Embracing Mistakes

I have always heard the mythical story of a CEO who was hired to replace another CEO who was fired for poor performance and, on new CEO’s first day on the job, he finds three envelopes in his desk drawer. The envelopes were paper clipped together with a note and labeled numbers 1, 2 and 3. The note gave directions to only open the letters when the new CEO got in trouble and to start with the first envelope.

Six months later the new CEO gets in trouble and he immediately reaches for the first envelope and tears it open. The note inside the envelope says to “Blame your predecessor.” This suits the new CEO as he makes up a story that the previous CEO really made the decision and he is just learning about it.

A year later, the CEO gets in trouble again and he remembers the envelopes. He takes the second envelope out of the drawer and opens it to find a message saying, “Blame the employees.” He does so and the pressure is off him.

Six months later the CEO gets in trouble again and he remembers the third envelope sitting in his desk drawer. He opens the third envelope and it says, “Prepare three envelopes.”

Who Are You Blaming?

Do you as the EMS manager have three hypothetical envelopes sitting in your desk drawer? If you have failures in your EMS organization, are you accepting responsibility, or do you blame your predecessor, your boss, your employees or others for the shortcomings your organization is experiencing?

Learning to embrace mistakes or shortcoming in your EMS organization is a sign that you have matured as an EMS manager. You have to swallow your pride and ego and admit there are problems. I like to think it is NOT about swallowing your pride, but a true sign that you are a leader, confident in your abilities, and you merely admit problems within the organization are not problems, but an opportunity to improve.

Let’s say your EMS organization handles a multi-patient bus crash involving 22 patients. Things do not go smoothly. There is total confusion. EMTs and paramedics are not sure of their roles on whether they should be doing triage, treatment or transport. Hospitals are unaware that such a large volume of patients will be coming in; some hospitals are overwhelmed, while others receive no patients. Finally, you, as the EMS manager over the entire event, tries to manage all divisions and groups under an incident management system by yourself instead of delegating others to manage these areas.

Like any multi-casualty event, eventually everyone is transported to a hospital, but there is rancor that it was a total disaster (no pun intended). As the EMS manager ,you hear the grumblings. Even when you walk into the office the next morning, your secretary says, “I hear things did not go so smoothly yesterday.”

Here is where you show your maturity level as an EMS manager. You can either embrace your mistakes or kid yourself and think that you did a wonderful job managing the multi-casualty event.  

Embracing the mistakes that were made on the multi-casualty event by you is not a weakness. It can be a strength. Many organizations will do an after-action review of an event or, if it is serious enough where one of your employees may have been seriously injured or killed, bring in an outside independent body to do an investigation and make recommendations to prevent it from happening again.

It does not have to be an operational issue when it comes to embracing your mistakes. It can be administrative issues. Maybe some extra equipment you had was improperly surplused by a staff member; possibly you let a contract expire for medical supplies because you did not properly keep track of contract expiration dates; or maybe your ambulance maintenance program is poor and ambulances continue to break down. All of these are opportunities to accept responsibility that there are shortcomings in the system and they need to be addressed. Pretending that they do not exist and hiding your head in the sand will not make the problems go away.

The bottom line to remember is that there are no mistakes when managing your EMS agency, there are only lessons.

As an EMS manager you need to learn to accept your mistakes and shortcoming if you wish to grow as a leader. As I like to say, “Problems are nothing but opportunities.”