Good Leaders, Part III - Handle Mistakes
I talked about how great leaders do during either war time or peace time before. The next topic is orthogonal to this dimension, and it deals with mistakes.
Everyone makes mistakes. That’s just human nature. How to handle mistakes though shows a lot about a person’s character.
For a leader, there are 4 types of mistake handling:
Their team made a mistake
They themselves made a mistake
Their peers made a mistake
Their leadership made a mistake
Today, I’ll focus on the first situation: when their team made a mistake.
Worst leaders: Don’t care
This might be a surprise, but I definitely consider those don’t-care leaders as the worst. These leaders don’t say anything, and treat it as if nothing has happened. They might be doing so with the intention of “showing empathy, and providing a safe environment for making mistakes”, but the reality is this type of leaders create an untrustworthy environment, because people can get away with whatever they do. One bad apple in such an environment will destroy all the good apples, and good people will leave.
Bad leaders: Act punitively
These leaders will take notice, and will call out the situation and take action to make sure it doesn’t happen again. This is good.
But they do so by punishing the team member who made the mistake.
There are many forms of “punishment”.
Most obvious is the action of yelling at the person who made the mistake in front of everyone else, or physical violence (even if it’s not towards the person, like throwing something at the wall).
Bad performance rating or rejection of promotion is also a clear form of punishment.
Other subtle forms of punishment exist too, and some of them might even be unintended. For example, no longer giving the person challenging tasks could be perceived as punishment too.
The intricacy of what's considered as punishment is it’s purely determined from the viewpoint of the recipient of the treatment.
You might ask, why is this bad? Isn’t it justifiable if someone made a mistake, they pay for the consequences?
The problem is this can create an environment where people are afraid. Psychological safety is a critical component for high performing teams. Leaders acting punitively puts hugh risk on psychological safety.
Good leaders: Help the mistake maker
A good leader cares about their team, and when their team makes a mistake, they offer help. They call out the mistake so that everyone is aware, but they show empathy to the person who made the mistake. They help the person to stand up and grow from the mistake.
Note that this could mean that the person who made the mistake still needs to face the consequences, but the consequences must be perceived as fair from the person and the team. This is the key to preserve the psychological safety, so that the team is not afraid of taking any risks in the future.
Good leaders bring an environment where it’s recognized that everyone makes mistakes, and while we try to avoid them, we understand mistakes are inevitable to happen, and will be handled with fairness and dignity.
Best leaders: Treat mistakes as opportunities to improve the system
The best leaders take one step even further. They anticipate mistakes, and treat them as opportunities.
They recognize the occurrence of mistakes is foremost due to systems being not good enough to prevent such mistakes, and while such imperfection exists, anyone could be tripped up and make such mistakes. Therefore the best leaders take mistakes as opportunities to discover how to strengthen the system. They de-focus on the people who ran into the problem, but primarily focus on the problem itself.
These leaders create an environment where people are encouraged to consistently improve the system, with psychological safety. It’s a joy to be in such an environment.