What’s the most impactful lesson you’ve learned from a failure in your career, and how do you apply that knowledge to your work today?
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I once found myself in hot water for building a dashboard that pointed out key service performance problems, without so much as asking the service owner first. I was trying to help, but they were annoyed and complained to my manager's manager to have me terminated. I thought I was doing something positive: I had visibility into the data and knew a third-party managed services provider was doing worse than it should have been. I constructed a report to indicate where the missing pieces were and presented it to my manager. We decided to go in with the service owner and determine how to resolve this.
Sadly, the service owner didn't perceive it as help. They were shocked and perceived it as a personal attack. I was lucky to have a decent manager who stood behind me. I wasn’t fired, but I learned a crucial lesson: even when you think you’re doing the right thing, you must check the temperature and understand the human emotion involved, especially when your work scrutinizes someone else’s.
Failure is something to learn from, not hold you back. If you're learning and applying those lessons, then: "You fell, you didn't fail." As long as you keep getting up and learning, improving, then you're increasing your value, not failing. Maybe the most impactful lesson looking back no on my career is the importance of learning the lesson's from your mistakes. Life is tricky like that. If you fail to learn a lesson it puts a new wrapper on it and sends it back. Over and over an over until you figure it out. Then the prize is you get to move ahead to the next lesson...
Read the Supplier Code of Conduct from clients: early in my career lost a job for cold calling other contacts (non-clients) in a company we worked with which was against their policy though a very common practice. I learned that as a small company you have to be better, as the largest companies in the world will use any excuse to not change and therefore remove you. Thankfully the company kept their vendor status but were forced to fire me. I also learned, as it was the only time I have been fired, how much of my identity was caught up in my work, the need to be resilient, and forgive yourself when you make a mistake.
In spite of the disappointment and self-critiquing, recognize that you have allies in the organization and in your network who are available and willing to support you through the crisis. A recent situation revealed a greater level of trust and confidence in my abilities among our CEO and Board of Directors than I had imagined. This support allowed me to 'rebound' and be resilient through the crisis, and in fortifying our strategy and generating outcomes. Bottom Line - Believe in Yourself and Trust Others.
Never give up.