Consultant/Insultant  

After staying up half the night with his crying, colicky 3 month old, Carl, a 25 year old sales manager, overslept. By the time he made it to work, nearly an hour late, he had missed an important meeting, and his boss was not happy. “You’re new to the company,” she hollered, quite frustrated. “You know how important it was that you show up on time.  I gave you a position many people here coveted, so it makes me look bad when the new sales manager I hire, straight from our competitor, misses the first meeting! What were you thinking?”

Not missing a beat, Carl replied, “Well, if you had kids, you’d understand.”

Have you ever taken a bad situation and made it worse by sticking your foot in your mouth?

Carl may have innocently responded to his boss’s insensitivity, but this opened up a bag of worms. Not only did the boss not speak to him for a few weeks, but she demoted him, and took him out of his management position, placing him in the sales pool.

Furthermore, his response echoed throughout the building. Yes, some admired his bad taste and brutal honesty, but it was a dumb, sexist thing to say about a much admired workaholic who started the company from scratch several decades earlier. Had she been a man, would he had said the same thing?

 Carl became known as “The idiot who says the wrong things.”

This story (told in a slightly different version) can be read in Gary’s new book, The Mouth Trap: Strategies, Tips and Secrets to Keep your Foot out of your Mouth. But tune in this Wednesday at 7 a.m. PST for some specific suggestions for how to avoid these humiliating, shameful, and embarrassing moments that haunt our careers sometimes…forever.