In reading Drucker’s chapter on picking people, one of the aspects of being a leader that he acknowledges is being able to admit when you have made a bad decision. I have experienced examples of leaders not admitting they have made a bad decision and not doing anything about it to avoid confrontation.
As Drucker points out not acting to correct a bad decision can be very detrimental. I witnessed this first hand in my experience of working as a legislative aide and office manager in the New York State Assembly. During the search for a person to take my position (I was leaving the position to focus on school) the Assembly member did not follow Drucker’s principles for hiring. The Assembly member hired someone only after four interviews and had contacted the candidate to tell them they had been hired less than an hour after the interview. During training it quickly became apparent that the candidate was not living up to our expectations and was relying heavily on my explanation and re-explanation of routine office tasks. In my last two weeks, I went to the Assembly member with my concerns and she said that she agreed with me. However, I was told to continue acting as a crutch for the newly hired person as long as I was there. A week after I left the office permanently, I received an email from our intern saying that my replacement had been fired over the phone by our chief of staff. The Assembly member violated another of Drucker’s principles and avoided confrontation of the situation. Although the office was able to hire someone shortly after, there was a period where there was no full time staff and no one was available to train the newly hired person. This put the newly hired person in a difficult situation in which they were expected to adapt.
I believe that this scenario is the antithesis of Drucker’s lesson on hiring. Although admitting a mistake and taking action to correct it is never easy, it is almost certainly easier to correct a problem when it becomes apparent rather than waiting and letting it inevitably grow. Leadership is not only about knowing how to make the right decisions. It is also about knowing when you have made a mistake and knowing how to take that mistake and not only fix it but turn it into a learning opportunity. Drucker points out that mistakes are an opportunity to take a unique problem and turn it into a learning experience. Once a unique problem is solved it becomes generic problem and is easily solved when it arises again.
