A major outage in your data center is a big deal. But don't fall victim to the "blame game". This is a primary learning opportunity.
Years ago, I read a story about an IBM sales VP who had just lost an important account. He was summoned into CEO Thomas Watson Sr's office.
Watson asked him, "do you know why you're here?"
"You're going to fire me?" asked the VP with a fair amount of resignation.
"Hell no! It just cost me $600,000 to train you!"
Notice how Watson turned blame into value.
When I was running a Wall Street data center, I made clear to my team again and again, when a problem arose, they needed to answer three questions:
1) Exactly what happened? Do they know the details, the root cause, etc.?
2) What will we change to ensure it does not happen again?
3) If it happens again, how will we be faster to fix it?
If they could tell me these three things, then it's not a problem; it's a learning experience. |