Avoiding Failure/Live It!

The best learning can come from failure.
If you're willing to be taught.

After two years of struggling to turn around a hurting and hapless department, I was mercifully released from that responsibility. At first, I was angry and ready to jump back into a similar newspaper situation to show them what a mistake they had made. But, after getting a week's worth of decent sleep, I realized I didn't want that.

I redirected my life into a new career field and have never looked back--except to harvest lessons from that very difficult, yet fruitful experience.

Here are several of the plums. Take and eat. It will be good for you:

Determine to be the very best employee. As a first-time manager, I had no end of employee problems (too many to detail here). After that experience, I determined to be the very best employee any boss could have.

• From the simplest gestures of being punctual and courteous to the more critical values of honesty and dependability, I worked hard to be the employee I had wished for as a manager.
• I learned to be discerning, to fully understand what my supervisor wanted to accomplish, and then worked hard to make it happen.
• Coming out of college, I thought being a manager was the thing to be. I learned the high value in being an employee, a member of a team that contributes to the highest level and helps make things work.

Know the vision, live the vision. As a new manager, I failed to recognize the need for a clear vision that my department could shoot for. What was our goal, where were we headed?

• As a manager, create a vision for where you want the department to go.
• Then, either develop a path yourself that everyone can follow to get there or pull your team together to help create that map.
• Communicate the vision in a clear and attractive way. Why would we want to go there? What's in it for the team? Communicate it often.

Concentrate on the basics. There are a lot of great ideas out there, new things to try, revolutionary theories--all well and good, if you are on the right track to begin with. When you're digging yourself out of a hole and trying to get back into the race, the basics are what should occupy your time.

• Hire well.
• Take the time necessary to train.
• Set expectations and follow-through with check-ups to see how folks are doing.
• Set milestones that are measurable and reachable.
• Manage to those milestones and reward people who hit the target.

If you're an employee, ask for these things. You need a vision to shoot for and help learning your job and growing in your ability to accomplish it in an excellent fashion.

Always shoot for excellence, realizing that the real world will often throw obstacles in your way. When I go target practicing, I always aim for the bulls-eye. I don't always hit it, but I'm generally close and get better with practice.

Avoiding Failure/Go Deep

There are two sides to a job interview.

The one we seem to focus on most is impressing the prospective employer. Important for sure; but, as the prospective employee, you also have a responsibility to evaluate both the organization and the task you're expected to perform.

(Reality is, most employers would be impressed by someone who spends a little less time touting his own credentials and more time investigating the task and people who will be his responsibility.)

You need to evaluate the task before you. Ask some questions: "What are the goals? What has the recent record been in terms of achieving those goals? What have been the hurdles? What do you expect to change about these hurdles if I come on board? What kind of support will I have as I attempt to turn this situation around?"


If the organization has been on the downside of its goals, and the only plan to turn things around is bringing you on board, that spells trouble. The organization should have a plan and should be moving in a positive direction. If management has no clue what to do or is not willing to dedicate the people or resources necessary to help turn things around, don't touch it.


You also need to look beneath the surface into the recent politics of the organization. The small daily I joined at age 26 had been a family-owned newspaper for many years. A corporation had just bought out the paper and had inserted a company general manager to bring the business into compliance. I was his first hire.


I just didn't understand how incredibly detrimental those politics would be on my ability to accomplish the job. Immediately, I was an outsider with a staff that was loyal to the family publisher and suspicious of the corporation. And who was my boss--the corporate general manager who hired me or the family publisher?


As best you can, investigate the recent ownership, organizational shuffles, supervisory and staff turnover, and anything else that will give you a clue as to the stability of the organization and the currents beneath the surface that will impact your success.


Finally, take a look at the staff that will either work for you or will work alongside you. How have they been treated? How is their morale? How do they feel about a new boss coming on board? What did they feel about the old boss? What do they think needs to happen in order to turn things around? Do they have the energy to do what's necessary?


The staff I inherited in that small daily had been sorely mistreated. They had an absentee boss who threw too much on them and gave them little support. He also hired people who did not pull their weight, which caused continual conflict within the staff. The staff motto had become "every man for himself," because they had been in survival mode for so long.


Too much of my early tenure was spent handling personnel issues. Within two years, practically the entire staff had turned over. It was two years of ineffectiveness, because of the distractions and because, it's true, having the right team on board does make all the difference.

Today, 25 years down the road, I look back and imagine what could have been had I had the experience, perspective and maturity to investigate and identify issues and evaluate my own ability to handle those challenges.

Today, it would be different--primarily because today I know failure is a real possibility.

Avoiding Failure/Think About It

Have you ever been fired?

I have, and I don't recommend it.

But good can come out of any situation and, 25 years on the green side of one of my worst-ever experiences, I can recount all the positives that grew out of what seemed a devastating setback.

Let's start at the beginning with a lesson to young men about moving too far, too fast.

At age 26, I was hired as a department manager at a small daily newspaper. At one national meeting, the chain's CEO declared me the youngest circulation manager within the company. Pretty heady stuff. It was a major assignment all right, but one that was beyond my experience and skills at the time if only I had been mature enough to recognize it.

I had gone from college into a one-year training program and a short assignment as a mid-level manager straight into this department head position. As I look back, there were a variety of problems with that scenario.

A major one is that the maturity needed to lead people through major problems can only come with time and experience. Not only did I not have the time investment needed, I had not been in the business long enough to experience the kinds of problems I would face as a department head.

Worse yet, I was not even experienced enough to recognize the depth of problems that existed in the department and the newspaper I was joining.

I had failed to heed the advice of a mentor who warned me about moving too far, too fast. At that young point in my life and my career, I had not experienced failure; so I assumed I could handle anything. I found that I couldn't.

Wednesday, I want to talk with you about how to steer clear of a bad job situation in the first place--an important tactic if you want to avoid failure on the job. I'll spend Friday sharing about some of the mistakes I made as a first-time manager that contributed to my downfall.

Listen and learn, if you have the maturity.