Career-Building Blunder: Difference between revisions

A subordinate screws up. Badly. Someone dies, or someone close to them gets hurt, or lots of time and money is lost. He thinks he's screwed. But the Boss decides instead to keep or even promote them on the basis of this failure, reasoning that the subordinate will forever more be motivated by [[My Greatest Failure|that mistake]].

 

 

The employee might become a [[Failure Knight]], dovetailing with this trope: someone with empathic, almost embarrassing levels of devotion stemming from their past failure.

See also [[Secret Test of Character]], [[Training Accident]], [[You Did Everything You Could]]. Compare with [[You Have Failed Me]], when a subordinate gets harshly (and, often, terminally) punished for even trivial mistakes.

 

 

 

** Grand Admiral Thrawn promotes a subordinate who failed to capture Luke's ship with a [[Tractor Beam]]. The subordinate received high praise because he went above and beyond his duty in his efforts, creating new strategies on the fly that, even though they failed, still bespoke top-notch problem-solving skills. (Bonus points for actually taking responsibility for his failure.) The tractor beam operator was then told to work out a way to counter Luke's trick. [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|And he did.]]

** Contrast with a similar situation in a previous book; the tractor beam operator in that case exhibited both incompetence and insubordination--he had failed to capture the right target, and then tried to pass the buck on to his superior. Once Thrawn got a grasp of the situation, ''that'' tractor beam operator got executed.

** This happened, in a rather unusual way, to Bevel Lemelisk, one of the designers of the original Death Star. He had been responsible for the exhaust port flaw on the original Death Star. The Emperor [[You Have Failed Me|had him executed for that blunder]]...and then used a Sith technique to transfer his consciousness to a clone body. Lemelisk was then placed in charge of redesigning the Death Star. And every time he made another mistake, the Emperor would execute him [[The Many Deaths of You|in some new gruesome manner]], then transfer his consciousness to a clone body again.

* Piankhy, the title character of ''The Black Pharaoh'' by Christian Jacq, does this to a village leader who betrayed him, not before scaring him a bit by shaking a knife.

** In season two's "The Mistake": After Chase kills a patient by neglecting to ask some routine questions and gets massively sued by her brother, House decides not to fire him, not because he figured that Chase would learn from his mistake, but because he'd figured that since the news of {{spoiler|the death of Chase's father}} had led to his screw-up, it wouldn't happen again because now {{spoiler|both his parents were dead}}.

** When Foreman kills a patient in season three's "House-Training" by misdiagnosing a simple {{spoiler|staph infection}}, House doesn't even consider firing him because he knows that Foreman will "do it again." House figures, in his very own way, that since they're Super Extraordinary Doctors who specialize in [[Televisually Transmitted Disease]] and save buttloads more patients than regular ones, that this translates to them [[Rock Beats Laser|missing the really basic stuff sometimes]].

* ''[[The Sandbaggers]]'': The Director of Operations uses something like this to select his titular spies; his secretary observes that all his agents are superhumanly dedicated to make up for a self-perceived defect or inadequacy.

* ''[[The West Wing]]''

** The pilot episode of has Josh get this treatment from Pres. Bartlet.

* ''[[CSI]]'': Grissom is told to fire Warrick because Warrick left a scene and, as a result, rookie CSI Holly Gribbs is killed. Grissom tells Warrick that he's already lost one CSI, and that he doesn't want to lose another. Warrick then becomes one of the most reliable members of the team.

** To be precise, Grissom's stated reason for not letting Warrick go is that if he fired Warrick for making a mistake, he'd also have to fire himself and the rest of the team, because they've ''all'' made mistakes at one time or another.