You probably can’t avoid making mistakes

I remember when I was first promoted to sales manager. 

“I know what I’m doing here. I’m really going to get things moving.”

Whoa, was I mistaken. 

I didn’t get it right with my first team. Or my second team, or my third team. So am I a particularly slow learner? 

Don’t think so. It just takes time to get the right experience and get things where they need to be. On top of that, I worked in organizations that didn’t care about anything but the transaction and the number. Hard to develop yourself, let alone your team in those places.

Once I got to build my own team, that’s when I started figuring it out. Even then, the first time round I made a mistake – hiring people that were too much like me. 

Here’s the thing though, making mistakes isn’t the issue. 

Not learning from them is.

These days, I’d do things very differently with the benefit of all that experience. But if I hadn’t stopped to think about what went wrong and made a conscious effort to learn from it, I’d still be doing the same stupid shit.

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