At Amazon I had quickly win over an upset senior leader when my job was on the line. After a launch failure at Amazon, I found myself in a room with the CEO of the Retail business, Jeff Wilke, where he was evaluating whether or not to replace me in the role.
Some will say wow, you were about to be punished for a mistake.
Well, when you accept an executive role, you accept that the stakes are high and that sometimes the damage you can do while you are "learning" is too expensive and dangerous for the company to accept.
If you are not willing to live on the edge where one mistake can be too many, probably big leadership roles are not for you.
With Wilke, the key was to be both direct and transparent. To show that I owned the failure and my role in it (that I was not blaming anyone else) and that I had a clear plan to avoid repeating the failure.
For Jeff, what also turned out to matter was that my mistake had been caused by bad judgement rather than ignorance.
I pushed an under-tested product live to hit a marketing date. Bad judgement.
I knew the risk I was taking, gambled, and lost.
Interestingly, Jeff found this more acceptable than if I had been blind to the risk I was taking. That is, if I had not realized that the product was under-tested. He told me to my face that if I had not known the risk, he would now be discussing my departure. 😦
I assume he believed that he could instruct me on how to manage risk in the future, but he could not take the time or the risk if I lacked the basic skills.
Anyway, I kept my job and was ultimately promoted to a larger role.
Sue Bethanis and I are offering a free Lightning Lesson through Maven on Monday, September 16th.
It's free. Sign up here:
https://lnkd.in/guTDJsxA
Readers - how do you feel about the knife edge, where some honest mistakes can still scare others into removing you? I do not want to fly on a plane where the pilot honestly drifted off because they were really tired.
