Personal Development & Mentoring

There are clearly two perspectives at work here – two meanings given to the same event. For the new employee, the meaning given was dreadful: he focused on the mistakes made, the costs incurred, and his feeling of failure. He clearly would not have been surprised to have been given the sack. But for his manager, the meaning was different; the costs, the mistakes, had already been incurred. They could not be recovered; the best that could be done was to learn from them – and that led to his conversation with the project manager. And to continue the different perspectives theme – what one regarded as ‘a grilling’, the other saw as probing for understanding.

This really follows on from the previous point. The Chief Executive is as likely to have been upset, frustrated and even angry about the costly mistake; that is a typical, human response. But to his credit, he was able to reframe it – put a different interpretation on the event. Rather than see it through the frame of complete loss, he chose to see it ‘reframed’ as a costly investment in learning.

And this follows from the previous point. In one sense, there was a negative return on investment: a £500, 000 loss; but if the reframe and consequence ‘grilling’ led to someone improving their future performance, then there is a different assessment of RoI, By talking to the project manager the Chief Executive could tell whether learning had taken place, and if it had, then that would ensure there would be some return on the investment.

This stands for ‘short term pain, long term gain’. Sure enough, in the short term, the immediate loss of £500,000 is very painful. But set this against the longer term gains, of which there could be two. Firstly, the project manager is very unlikely to make the same mistakes again; and secondly, suppose the Chief Executive had sacked the project manager: what then? Presumably someone else would be appointed in his place – and with what guarantee they would not make a similar, costly mistake? Who would you rather employ: the same person, learning from his errors, and being given another chance to make amends and shine; or someone new…?