A manager reflects on the hardest lessons from early leadership, focusing on hiring mistakes and difficult disciplinary decisions. The talk emphasizes learning from errors and building resilience when things go wrong.
You will hire the wrong people. You will mess up a disciplinary conversation. You will screw up. And that's just a reality that you can't beat yourself up on. You just need to understand it's going to happen. Despite that, you need to fully believe that you and the people around you can make things right. This rule sounds so simple when I'm saying it abstractly in this video, but in those moments where you realize, oh, my God, I hired a monster, like, this is the worst person on our team. How did they get through our screening? Oh, my gosh, how are we going to get out of this? Or you find out that someone is stealing from you or that they were conducting employment fraud. I mean, all of these things have happened to me. And I remember especially early on that it would just break me down. I would just be like, how did I let this happen? Why didn't I get this right? And it would just hurt. It would be like a sucker punch. And recognizing now that it's not about the strength to never have a mistake, it's about the strength to get through the mistake, it really. It really helped me, and maybe it'll help you as well.
