Eva's Business Leadership Blog

Here is a very important lesson in Self-Leadership.

Many years ago, when the first big firm I worked for had been sold, and at the new firm, I’d made a couple of dramatic big sales, the new supervisor asked me to work more with the original members of his firm, even though neither our work nor our clients overlapped.  I see now I had no idea what he was asking.

I Never Asked

I know I never asked him because I was sure at the time I knew what he meant.  I was sure he was asking me to do the very thing I didn’t want to do:  work on his other employees’ projects in order to increase my billed hours.  I didn’t like that.  I was a big-picture business developer and risk-taker, both of which strengths had resulted in big sales for the new firm.  I wanted to have free rein to do more of that and not be pressured over my billed hours.  After all, my job was to create work and billable hours for other people, and I was good at it.  “Doesn’t he know that??” I said to myself.

I Thought I Already Knew

Who knows what he knew?  Who knows what he was asking?  I certainly didn’t because I didn’t ask him.  Who knows what I might have learned if I’d asked him for his wants and needs and then leaned in?  But I’ll never know because I was sure I already knew.  To answer your question, no, I didn’t comply with his request, which added to our never really getting along, though at the time I didn’t believe I had any role in that.  Sam, if you’re reading this, I was wrong.  I should have asked you want you meant and what you wanted.

Reader, have you ever made that mistake of thinking you already knew?  Please “comment”.

What if there were one thing you could do in your work that guaranteed more and more success in the future?  What if this one thing applied just as much to your entrepreneurial success?

Air Force teams do an “after action report” on completed endeavors, and the central item is the list of “Lessons Learned“, both good lessons from successes and bad lessons from failed efforts.  You can imagine how important the lists are when they’re reviewed before the next major effort.

Listing, then drilling down through your Lessons Learned after each project, whether you work for a big firm or for yourself, is just as important to your success as it is to the Air Force!  Your Lessons Learned are a gold mine holding bigger successes for you in the future.  All you have to do is drill for them.

Without Emotion or Blame

At the big engineering firm where I worked, we learned how to list our Lessons Learned without emotion or blame.

After these years of practice, and now when the stakes of failure seem higher, am I still as willing to look dispassionately at my errors, gaps, and failures?

Don’t Re-run the Blame

Do I drill down through them “without emotion or blame”?  Or, because I work solo, am I quick to go straight to blaming myself and make the failure worse because I’m missing out on the Lessons Learned?

Do I learn the lessons?  Or only re-run the blame? 

Which do you do?