Our employee made a big mistake, should we give him a second chance?

Last night I sat next to a serial entrepreneur at dinner, we were talking about things that go wrong in business when he shared a story about a major stuff up that had happened at his company.

I can’t divulge any details (for obvious reasons) so I will call the entrepreneur Jack, the company Blue and the errant employee Bob. What I can tell you is that Bob’s stuff up involved a major client, that it was the client that discovered the stuff up and that the stuff up related to the core business of Blue.

As Jack was explaining how he had calmed down the irate client and, surprisingly, retain them, I was presuming that Jack had sacked Bob.

When I discovered that he hadn’t, I almost choked on my dinner.

Jack explained that when he had first found out about the stuff up he wanted to sack Bob on the spot. But Jack also realised that, in the emotion of the moment, he was likely to have a very unprofessional conversation with Bob, so he decided to take a few deep breaths and a couple of hours to simmer down.

When Jack later spoke to Bob he learned that Bob was having a tricky time in his personal life. While Jack didn’t accept this as an excuse for Bob’s behaviour it did help him understand this uncharacteristic lapse in judgement.

It also planted a seed in Jack’s mind that sacking Bob may not be the right answer.

Jack spent a number of days wrestling with this delemma. His analytical mind told him to sack Bob but his gut feeling was to keep him on. Jack decided to keep him and explained his decision like this: “Bob was excellent at his job and this episode aside he was a star employee. He seriously regretted the stuff up and has always been very loyal to the business. Should I really get rid of one of my best employees? No.”

Jack had worried that retaining Bob in the business would send the wrong message to his other staff; he thought that they may see this event as a lowering of the standards.

So Jack made sure that everyone in the business understood exactly what quality at Blue looked like and the importance attributed to it.

But he also acknowledged that we all make mistakes, and he felt that it was important that the right people were given a second chance.

Eighteen months later Bob is still with the business and his performance has been fantastic.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses: Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).