Coming clean

I have been bad-mouthing our marketing guy for several months now. At least since the beginning of this column. This negative attitude has propagated throughout our company, mostly by me, and caused the him to be marginalized. So he now operates in the margins and is essentially useless to the company.

How did this happen? I'll tell you exactly how it happened and I'll come clean in the process. He made a few mistakes and had a few bad moments where his sensitivities and frustration got in the way of business. Is this a hanging offense? Maybe it is, but in our company for one reason or another it wasn't. But I got down on him anyway, and because it's easy to be negative I got our CEO and some other engineers down on him too. It didn't take long until we lost all respect and essentially prevented him from doing any useful work.

One or two isolated incidents did not make our marketing guy incompetent, I made him incompetent by propagating a perception formed from sensitivity and frustration. Bad for business, I think so.

Unless you are going to fire a person, always think positive and focus on their strengths. And do not let one or two isolated incidents destroy a good history.