#126 a mess

I came home from work to discover that my dogs (ages 15 months and 7 months) had eaten the end of the arm off my couch.  Yes, it was de-stuffed right down to the wood foundation and my living room looked like there had been a pillow fight.

I am sometimes on better behavior in the office than at home, so when I am really upset I try to act with my 4-legged "children" the way I would respond if they were employees.  So I didn't yell or scream; instead I put the dogs into their crates, locked the doors, and went to my desk to find the silver lining lesson in all of this so I could write about it.

At first, I didn't believe that anything equivalent to this had ever happened at work.  But when I really thought about it, I realized that in fact I recently had an employee "eat my couch".  It was an isolated incident, but serious and we needed to take action quickly and calmly.  Yelling wasn't involved; blame wasn't involved.  There was an egregious action and swift consequences for it.  

We have all made errors: in calculations, in judgment or in risk assessment.  When something happens that is outside of the acceptable norm, I believe that you quietly and calmly clean up the mess and learn from it.  And then you quickly move on.  Spending the evening stewing about the mess caused by my hounds is no more productive than dwelling on what could have/should have been with my employee.  A mess only remains a mess until you take action to move beyond it.

-- beth triplett
leadershipdots.blogspot.com
@leadershipdots
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