Admitting When You’re Wrong

Can you share with us a story about when you didn’t have to be vulnerable with your team and your employees?

Oh, boy, you’re putting me on the spot here. But the best way to be vulnerable is to admit when you get things wrong. I’ll tell you that as we’ve gone through this whole COVID crisis over the last year and a half, and the industry changed dramatically, the world changed, in fact, dramatically. It was very difficult to make decisions about everything from work from home policies, to just data decisions became exceedingly difficult to get right. And I know I there were several situations where I made a call, I made a call with imperfect information because nobody had all the data, all the information that was necessary. And then later, I had to admit to my team that “You know what, on this one, I got it wrong. And I think we’re going to have to pivot, I think we’d have to change because the world has in fact changed.” And your team…

I’m going to put you on the spot even further, can you give us an example of one thing that you did get wrong and you had to go back and say, you know what, I was wrong?

I’m only going to give you a certain level of detail on this one, Thuy. But it would be around the work from home policy, like how much flexibility is the right level of flexibility in order to balance getting work done, but then also giving people the freedom and the ability to balance out what they have to do at work in the office with the crisis that’s literally happening all around them, that’s taking their attention to take care of family, kids, and so on. So, yeah, that’s as detailed as I’m going to go.