Mistakes

I’ve never made a mistake at work, right? I’m sure you haven’t either.

The truth is that our management tasks often focus on identifying mistakes and preventing future ones. Fair enough I suppose. But people are fallible, and screw up sometimes.

Ourselves included.

The challenge as leaders is to create an environment where people are trying their best all the time. And when they create a problem, to take accountability and initiative to fix it.

This isn’t easy.

I’ve found that the best way is to work with the individual as a team. No matter who noticed the problem, to identify that we have a problem and project the impact it’s likely to have.

Then we explore solutions – both to fix the immediate issue and to prevent it from happening again.

Yes, we’re working on something negative. But my job is to keep the attitude positive because that will give better results in the end.

Sometimes the immediate reaction is to get rid of the employee because that seems to alleviate the pain. But what you really want is people who learn from their mistakes. If the person is learning, that’s the right thing.

And realize that the next mistake might just be the one YOU make. It happens.