I’ve spent much of this Sunday morning thinking about something that has very little to do with football, although it was Oregon’s 17-14 victory over Nebraska that brought it to mind. It’s something that anyone who has spent enough time in a leadership position eventually has to confront, and something that becomes increasingly difficult the more successful you have been. There is a moment in nearly every leadership career when the evidence begins to suggest that a decision you made, one you believed in and perhaps even defended, was simply the wrong one. What happens after that realization often tells us considerably more about a leader than the original decision ever could.
A year or so ago, perhaps a little longer, I made a couple of hiring decisions that turned out to be mistakes. They weren’t careless decisions, and they weren’t made without considering the qualifications, experience and character of the people involved. At the time, I believed I was bringing the right people into positions where they could succeed and help our organization become better. I had every reason to believe those decisions would work out, right up until the point when it became apparent that they weren’t going to.
That is one of the more uncomfortable realities of leadership. You can have excellent processes, conduct thorough interviews, check references and apply everything you’ve learned over decades of managing people, and you will still occasionally get it wrong. Sometimes the person isn’t who you thought they were, but more often I’ve found that the problem is considerably less dramatic. Someone who appears perfectly suited for a position simply doesn’t possess the particular combination of skills required to succeed once they’re actually doing the job. It doesn’t necessarily make them a bad employee, and it certainly doesn’t make them a bad person, but it creates a problem that eventually has to be addressed.
The difficulty isn’t always recognizing that the decision was wrong. Sometimes the evidence becomes so overwhelming that continuing to defend the original decision requires more imagination than accepting what is happening in front of you. The difficult part comes afterward, when acknowledging the mistake means accepting responsibility for what happens next, including the consequences for someone whose professional future may be dramatically altered by a decision you made in good faith.
I’ve been thinking about that in the context of Dan Lanning and Drew Mehringer,
