The Friday before Memorial Day, in 2002, I blew up the data center. It happened when I lit the PDUs for a new row of equipment that I had spent a week racking and cabling. A 110v power strip didn’t like the 220v I was giving it. The surge filled the room with a haze of smoke. The distinctive smell of fried capacitors and the sound of menacing alarms filled the room.

In an instant, the entire enterprise was down. I walked out of the data center and the sound of the door clicking behind me caused every head to pop out of the surrounding cube farm to see who had just walked out. We had a large monitoring screen in the Network Operations Center. It wasn’t red or blinking, it was just off. There was nothing.

I remember yelling, “Help!” Everything after that was a blur. The data center filled with every able-bodied engineer and technician around. In a matter of minutes, managers, directors, and VPs started filing onto the data center floor to see the mayhem first-hand.

We restored critical services in a matter of 3-4 hours, but cleaning up the collateral damage took weeks. I wasn’t fired for this. I honestly didn’t even fear getting fired for it. We had a culture that avoided the blame game. After the dust settled we put in some processes and procedures to look closer at our power equipment selections, and we also avoided powering on anything new during business hours.

This failure even helped us design a more resilient power system in the new data center that we built the following year. The only thing negative that happened to me was I earned the nickname “Sparky,” which took a while to shake. My management team understood that I was doing what I was empowered to do. It would have been easy to blame me, but they took the high road.

I don’t know how much the outage cost the company. It was probably a lot. I gained a valuable lesson on the type of leader I wanted to be. I wanted to pass on what had been modeled and pay it forward. I wanted to be the kind of leader that doesn’t play the blame game and doesn’t kill individuals for mistakes that were really caused by organizational process gaps.

This is the event that made “psychological safety” my native tongue. I expected this to be normal. Everywhere I’ve gone since I’ve looked for this culture. If it wasn’t already present, we made it so. It’s the only way to lead.

I hope your Memorial Day weekend is smooth. Try not to blow up the data center.