John Murphy's engineer deployed untested code and crashed a major client's systems. The client demanded he be fired, but Murphy's mentor asked: why fire someone you've trained? Murphy chose to keep him, turning the failure into a learning moment instead of a termination.
So, I had this situation with a team member of mine that I had my own IT business, a small business, just myself, to a multimillion-dollar business. And we had a team member that didn't follow the protocols for testing and immediately put it into active, and their systems went down. And that customer was expecting me to fire that engineer, right? How can you allow somebody like that to continue to work on my team? And I had fear that if I didn't fire that employee, that, that client would leave us. And that was one of our biggest clients. And in that high-pressure moment, it reminded me of something that my mentor had shared with me. And they said, why would I fire somebody when I spent so much money training them? And I was like, what? I didn't understand. The purpose. Am I being driven by fear here or am I, you know, really looking at what's the big picture? So it's a question that I often ask myself when I'm caught in a situation is what's the big picture? To step back.
