BE THE FIRST TO TELL

When I received my first management position, I was in charge of the shipping department. We had a very good system in place of checking off the items as the truck was loaded. To prevent mistakes, as the Supervisor, I was required to circle and initial the items which were loaded. If this weren't done, the person issuing the bills to the truck drivers would call and return the bills to me. Our performance rate was 100%.

One afternoon, near quitting time, we were loading a truck scheduled to go to Cleveland and Detroit. All the pallets were in a queue and I circled the Detroit load as complete and made sure the separator was in place to load the Cleveland portion. The lift driver was to load the pallets for Cleveland. The driver was in the truck waiting and I went ahead and checked off the items as being loaded to Cleveland and took the clipboard into the office and the driver came in and picked up the bills.

A few minutes later, I went back to the shipping department and there were the pallets for Cleveland still setting on the floor. I ran to find the lift driver but he had already clocked out. He later told me he left because I had the clipboard. I ran to the dock door and saw that the truck had already gone.

I was sick at heart. I didn't know what to do. Finally, I went into the office, feeling very certain that I was going to be fired when I told what had happened. My boss was sitting there and when I told him what happened, he immediately spun around and telephoned the Cleveland customer and very light-heartedly said, "Hey, Gary, it's John, we missed your load tonight; I'm sorry; we'll get it up there tomorrow."

My boss told me to sit down. I was trembling inside but I think I managed a calm exterior. He asked, "How long did it take you to come in to tell me?" I answered, "A half-hour." He then asked, "What do you think I should do?" I answered, "I guess you should fire me." He asked, "And how would that benefit me; I've already invested a great deal of time and money for your training?" I said, "You could take it out of my paycheck for the wasted trip." He answered, "No, we're not going to do that, but what lesson did you learn?" I said, "I was in too big of a hurry and I should have used the procedure instead of assuming that the work was done."

He said, "Yes, that's a good lesson, but more importantly, you now see why it's always the wise thing for you to BE THE FIRST TO TELL when you've made a mistake." I nodded and he said, "I would have really been pissed off if Gary had called ME all bent out of shape instead of my calling him."

He continued, "And I haven't failed to notice all the extra time you put in without pay and I'm not going to punish you by taking money away from you because I know this will never happen again with you!"

He concluded, "There is no way that I could punish you as much as you've already punished yourself in the last hour."

Many times after that, during my life, I gave the same kind of speech to people who'd made errors and when I would learn about the errors after the fact, I would always tell them of the time when I learned the lesson of being the FIRST ONE TO TELL.