Leadership: Avoiding the Dreaded "Unforced Error"
The term "unforced error" comes from tennis, where we often see capable players mess up shots they would routinely make. The expression is now widely used in business and politics. You can think of a "forced" error as one made under competitive pressure or a rapidly deteriorating situation, where time is short, options are limited and difficult trade-offs are needed. An "unforced error" is one that is totally on you. You have the resources and skill to make the right call and for some inexplicable reason, you blow it. Let's have a look at 3 causes of unforced errors and how to avoid them.
Breakdown in Routine
Leaders see certain types of situations again and again. The details may change, but the underlying pattern is the same. Like the tennis player, strong leaders develop a set approach for dealing with recurring patterns and after a while their success rate in these situations approaches 100%. And then, for reasons unknown, they fail to follow their own successful recipe and the result is an unforced error. Here's an example. An executive has learned over the years that whenever she is offered creative new purchasing terms she follows a systematic process beginning with a legal opinion. Then one day she is offered a deal that is "too good to be true" and immediately accepts it without getting the legal opinion. With the deal signed, the lawyers look at it and it's a disaster. Unforced error. The lesson here is to develop good decision-making routines and then to follow them without cutting corners.
Rushing When You Don't Need To
When faced with a difficult situation, one of the first things leaders must do is correctly assess the time pressure. When customers are complaining, results are tanking, employees are quitting and everyone is staring at YOU, it's easy to miscalculate the amount of time available to make the right call. From my experience, we almost always have a little more time than we think we do. In the post-mortem of many unforced errors we find that there was enough time to take that one extra step that would have avoided the whole mess.
Losing Focus
You've seen the tennis player waiting at the baseline to make a routine groundstroke. What's he thinking about? Well, if he's so confident in this shot that he's thinking about dinner tonight, chances are this one is going into the net. Same in leadership. Routine decisions still need your full attention. They will need it for a shorter time, but if your mind has already moved on to the next problem you could be heading toward an unforced error.
Even Roger Federer makes unforced errors, but not many. Similarly, as you advance in your leadership journey, it is important that the frequency of these mistakes goes down. You can do this by creating and following good decision-making routine, not rushing when you don't need to and giving each decision the focus it requires. Good luck!
#leadership #coaching #unforcederrors