Mom
came home from work at the law office one day and said that she got
her eyes opened quite wide that afternoon. Mr.
Danieu had been standing by Mom's desk talking to her when the phone
rang. Mom answered, and it was a client asking to speak to Mr.
Danieu. He motioned to Mom that she could just hand him the phone,
rather than transferring to his office and his having to go there to
get it.
Mom
could tell, as the conversation went on, that a mistake was in a
document the client had received from the office. She got nervous,
because Mom realized it was a mistake that she herself had
made! Feeling awful, she started working on an apology to say once
the phone call was over.
But
to Mom's surprise, while talking to the client, Mr. Danieu took
full blame for the mistake and told the client he would fix it
and put the new document in the mail as soon as he could!
That
impressed Mom so much!
He
was the boss, so he took responsibility for all that left his office.
This
was big!
The
fact that this story affected Mom enough to share the event with her
children in turn affected me – I learned that a good leader is one
who truly believes the buck stops here and takes
responsibility for all that goes through his/her business, and does
not blame others for mistakes that are made.
Years later I was at a seminar where people from all over the country were
giving talks, all of them with power-point presentations. One after
another, if there was a mistake on a slide, the speaker would say,
“oh, the secretary made a typo there.” And I would be so
disappointed – the speaker did not proof and correct the slide but
instead left the flaw there to blame on someone else.
But
mostly over the years, I have worked at places where the bosses are
more like Mr. Danieu was that day when he took the call at Mom's
desk. I do not mind fixing my mistakes, but I am impressed when the
boss does not publicly blame me when the error has gotten out
there for all the world to see!
127
20150507 Passing the Buck
No comments:
Post a Comment