Lessons From Battle-Scarred Managers
When a failure happens on your watch, you are responsible. Even if you are simply continuing policies and procedures from a previous management team. You end up taking it on the chin when things go bad. Just ask the former head of the Office of Personnel Management in Washington D.C.
But what happens when you find yourself in a mess but you don’t get the ax.
What if management comes down and says, “you made the mess, you get to clean it up!”
What then?
Well, the actions of the OPM offer a glimpse into what can be done when you are stuck with the job of making it right.
First, you have to identify the problem. In the case of the data breach, the first questions … where: what, when, how much and who? Each of these questions must be answered to restore any semblance of order and security in your system or protocols. However, none of those questions would be easy to answer in this case. Still, they must be answered, so you have to do two things: find the answers, and not lose productivity during that process.
Second, you need to make sure the people who need to know are in the know. Trying to hide a foul up or run from a mistake is a terrible strategy. Remember, job one is learning what really happened so it can be made right. You can’t do that while simultaneously hiding it from people who could help you, particularly those who hold the budget purse strings you will need to accomplish both the fix and business as usual.
When you decide to report to those who Need to Know, be brief and be specific. You are delivering bad news, not telling a story, so just get on with it. No hedging, no hemming and hawing. Give them the raw facts as well as your — hopefully already initiated — plan of action to mitigate any current or potential fallout.
Third, get good answers, not just the ones you want to hear. Accurate and actionable data is vital to digging oneself out of a disaster. It will not help you to have people tell you what you want to hear. It may feel good at that moment, but you can be absolutely certain it will come back to bite you.
One of your chief concerns will be to “Make sure this never happens again.” But do not get so focused on this goal that you fail to look for vulnerabilities in other aspects of your system or protocols. Incidents like what happened at OPM tend to create management myopia. They get so zoned in on keeping what happened from happening again that they fail to take the opportunity to improve in other areas. Don’t let that be you.
You may never be able to erase what happened, but you do have the opportunity to make changes that result in a net positive long-term.
Roman Temkin is a mobile entrepreneur and a businessman from NYC.
