Lisa Dawe Video

LISA DAWE: Learning from a Mistake, Video Case Transcript

Challenge

My name is Lisa Dawe. I'm a Division Vice President at Davita. Davita is a kidney care company that takes care of people whose kidneys have failed and need dialysis. I've been at Davita for four years, and I've been in the Division Vice President role for one year.

About a year into my role as a Regional Operations Director, I was invited a meeting with senior executives, and there was a group of high-potential junior executives, including me, invited to this meeting. We were invited to dinner, we thought this was just a social gathering, and we're suddenly assigned to one of two groups that evening who needed to then tackle a business problem and present it to the senior executive the next day. That, of course, created a lot of stress. All of us wanted to put our best foot forward, and we were very invested in the outcome.

The next day, when we presented our findings and our recommendations, I was pretty surprised to hear one of the senior executives say - to hammer us, hammer our conclusions, and really question the logic of the presentation. I spoke up and answered his question on behalf of our group and explain the logic and how we'd gotten to a conclusion, and the presentation ended and didn't think much about it after that.

Later that night, after the presentation, at a reception, another senior executive came up to me and she gave me some feedback, some unsolicited feedback that totally surprised me and frankly blindsided me. Her feedback to me was that I had basically pushed my point too strongly, pushed our team's point too strongly, and defended our position really inappropriately. What I should have done is listened more carefully to the feedback and just taken it for what it was and end it there.

Initially, it was just a sort of surprised, embarrassed, angry, "I can't be - that's not what I intended. How could they receive it that way?" Also, the embarrassment came from sort of a feeling of I think I might have failed some big test in front of all these executives who'd invited us there for this purpose, and then anger of kind of I thought this was an intellectual debate and where was it a bad thing to sort of engage in a question and answer kind of dialogue.

Another reaction that I had, though, was, "Wow, this is a different league." I am on a director level, think I'm doing okay, and I'm talking to people who are managing billion dollar businesses, and what - it's just a different league. I think that's what hit me. I - it did question sort of do I wanna play on that level?How do I feel playing on that level?Am I effective? Or is my style just not consistent with that?

Decision

For the first 24 hours after I got this feedback, I sort of kept to myself.I was very introspective as I usually am when I'm trying to process these things. I just was working through it in my mind and trying to figure out.It was what did I miss, how is that blind spot such a big, glaring blind spot for me. I didn't really talk to anybody about it. I played the situation over in my head repeatedly, and luckily I had the quiet of my hotel room to kind of do that in between meetings and things like that. It was really something I was processing. It was all I could think about.

After about 24 hours, I was at a place where I felt like I had a choice.I could accept that that feedback was probably true. There is definitely kernels of it if she was not the only one who felt it. There are kernels of it that were true and I really needed to try and improve the next time.

That was sort of one thing; just accept it, move on, improve. The other choice, or the other thing I thought I could to is maybe to try and get even more feedback, open myself up to even more scrutiny, but get feedback from the rest of the people in the room and just say, "What else did I miss here?"

I started with someone I knew well, with whom I was comfortable, so that if it was just a really hard conversation and more hard feedback, at least I was hearing it from someone I trusted and who sort of knew me beyond that one presentation.

As I thought about what I was gonna say to this - to the executives when I was getting feedback, I thought it was best to just start by acknowledging what I thought I'd done wrong and to just lay it out there and sort of say, "Here's the dirty laundry, I think that I - where I messed up." So that it wasn't something he had to revisit with me and remind me about, it was just more about, "Okay, how do I move forward an grow from this, and increase capability around so that none of us have to go through this again?"

I did it one-on-one, informally, literally in the hallways of this meeting.We were all still in the same meeting together. I knew I wouldn't have face time opportunities with them otherwise, and so I just caught them for two-three minutes at a clip to have this conversation.They were very open to it and in some cases said, "You know, that's just - there're bumps in the road, and don't worry about it, and here's one thing you might wanna think about for the next time."

Results

What I ended up with was a whole set of layers of feedback that I never would've gotten had I sort of shutdown and said, "I'm just gonna move on from this." Instead I'd sort of - I really enriched my toolkit, leadership toolkit, and sort of found that my executive presence over time, over the next year, really improved because of that specific feedback I got in that 24-hour period.

What also happened at that point was that the executives around me who were still watching, and we were all still on stage, these high-potential junior executives. I think it really helped them understand that I was not only capable of learning and I was open to it, but that over time, over the next year for example, that I was really ready for more because I had opened myself up in a way that was - that's necessary for higher-level leadership to feedback and to learning.

Less than a year later, I was promoted. Before I thought I would be put in this role, I was promoted to Vice President. At that dinner, the same senior executive who had hammered our team on our conclusions came up to me and said he and others were impressed at my - at the speed and scope of my improvement in the period since then, and that that had been a factor in my early promotion.

Lessons Learned

One of the biggest lessons I took from this experience was it doesn't matter that you failed or how you failed, it's really how you fix the failure. It is so important, especially for me, to process what I've heard. Those feedback that you get that's really tough, that hits you in your gut, versus sort of doing what you wanna do, which is sort of react on the gut level and lash out and get angry. The cy - when I let it cycle through, I really came out of it on a different side, on a more thoughtful, mature side that really kind of took the emotion out of it, and put me back in the driver's seat. It gave me full accountability for my prior actions and empowered me to say, "Okay, well, what are you gonna do better next time?"

Questions

Why did the executive interpret Dawe's response in the competition as inappropriate and why didn't she see it that way?

Why is she questioning whether she wants to "play in this league?"

What are some potential implications for your career?