Category: The concept of the “unforced error” is a pivotal one in tennis…”a mistake by the player who hits a shot…when the player has time to prepare and position himself to get the ball back in play and (still) makes an error.”
In professional tennis, the player with the fewest unforced errors usually wins. The same is true in business. (Pg. 1)
Overview
The Unforced Error is a book by Jeffrey A. Krames that I picked up in the Orlando International Airport for my return flight home from my honeymoon. At 155 pages long, with big type and small overall page dimensions, and using tennis examples as metaphors, it’s not a particularly taxing read; in fact, I read the entire book about halfway through my flight from Orlando to Philly.
What drew me to this book was not that it was short, but rather the secondary headline: Why Some Managers Get Promoted, While Others Get Eliminated. This is definitely a topic that I’ve always wondered about! When I was starting out in my career, I would just chalk up confusing promotions to favoritism or something else unobservable to the general workforce. Now that I’m a bit older, completing an MBA and developing a ‘bigger picture’ view for my career, it’s becoming quite clear to me that there are behaviors that improve your career, and we’ve all observed career limiting moves (or, “CLM’s”). According to this book, I’ve got quite a few CLM’s…but here is the main one:
Not Keeping Your Game Inbounds – The importance of self-control
The way this book is setup is very manager-like in that there are sections, each with several short subsections. There are no wordy diatribes here; state your business, give an example, provide the solution, then move on!
I’ve highlighted the ‘self-control’ section of this chapter, because it’s probably the biggest blind-spot I have in my daily work communication (and even my MBA teamwork):
Sometimes value codes are difficult to discern for an employee or manager. For instance, sometimes a senior manager simply cannot tolerate being challenged in public by a subordinate. So not challenging that senior person may be a rule to live by, but you won’t find it written anywhere…I have seen lack of self-control wreck more than one career and in many cases the person hadn’t a clue that what they were doing was killing their own future in that company. (pg. 61)
It’s always better to be extremely careful with what one says…in a public setting, especially when that person is, say, your boss’s boss, or worse yet, your boss’s boss’s boss. (pg. 62)
Ironically, I can call this a ‘blind-spot’ of mine, while being fully aware of the situation; it’s the in-the-moment control that I have the biggest problem with. I’ve had bosses tell me about how blunt my emails can be, or how sharp my responses can be in meetings, yet rarely do I ever realize this while it’s going on. In some cases, I don’t even realize that it has happened after the fact!
Rather than write the author’s solution to the problem, my analysis of my situation is that it is part of my communication and cognitive style, which is why it is such a blind-spot to me. The CCMBA program has been very helpful to me in highlighting these flaws; I thought all of the personality and conflict surveys we took in London were a bit excessive, until I read what the results were! What I perceive as honest and direct can be seen be others as arrogant; what seems obvious to me in a brainstorming meeting (in cases were I’ve already thought through an idea, seen the flaw, and moved on) can be seen as standoff-ish or dismissive.
Ultimately, solving this problem is something I need to figure out, as I’m at a point in my career where I am interacting with a lot of upper-levels of management. What I’ve been able to get away with in the first seven years of my career (working with engineers and mathematicians) I won’t be able to do for too much longer without serious repercussions.
(As an aside, I swear that people in my office sometimes egg me on to say what we are all thinking, knowing that I am ‘fearless’. Or, get me to tell management the bad news that no one wants to admit to. That’s not helping me to overcome this career flaw!)
Conclusion
This book has been very helpful for me in identifying problem areas that I need to fix if I want to move to the proverbial ‘next level’ in my career. While this book is not necessarily a self-help book, it’s one that I keep coming back to help me think through situations that occur in my daily work life. For any of you out there with the same ‘next-level’ aspirations, or even for those of you who like both tennis and management/business books, I’d definitely recommend reading through this book. The “Aces!” summary sections of each chapter are alone worth the price of admission.
Sounds like a good book. I’ll be honest though, I am more likely to pick it up because it has big fonts and is an easy read. My brain can’t handle too much additional information right now. I wish I were a cotton farmer.