Welcome to issue No. 073 of the Lever

Mistakes happen.

People are fallible. You, me, all of us.

So what do you do when somebody makes a mistake on your watch?

Before we start...

You don't need a title to make an impact.

Regardless of your position, you can make an impact in your own way and feel good doing it.

​Check out this free 7-day email course from startup CEO Andrea Michalek.​

It will get you started quickly with the right tools, mindset, and momentum.

My phone rings.

“Where is your guy? He was supposed to be here 20 minutes ago, and I’ve got a bunch of high-priced technicians on the clock waiting to get started.”

It’s one of my clients. He called a few days ago for a vessel audit, and I know I passed the details to my team.

“I’m sure he’s just delayed. Let me check and get back to you.”

I hang up and immediately redial my operations manager. I ask what’s going on.

“…..”

Silence on the line. You can almost hear the realization.

“This one slipped through the cracks…”

Mistakes Happen

This is a universal truth.

Operations have processes to help standardize how things are done, and to avoid costly mistakes. But no process is perfect. The real world is messy, and it’s the daily deviations FROM the process by your people that get the work over the line.

But no person is perfect.

Each one of us is fallible. Sometimes things get missed. Maybe another call came in while taking down the instructions. Maybe the post it note you wrote your reminder down on falls off the monitor.

Blame Fixes Nothing

A second universal truth is this: Blame fixes nothing.

Every second you spend playing the blame game moves you farther from a solution to your immediate problem. And any punitive action you take that is based on blame only ensures that the problem will happen again. Because you won’t have addressed the root of the issue, which is always systemic.

The urge to blame is a powerful one. Its self-preservation, which is a lizard brain reaction programmed into our very cells since the dawn of time. By blaming someone else you distance yourself from the mistake.

How You Respond Matters

But how you respond as a leader matters. Take it too far and you risk hurt feelings, loss of trust, and over time your team member may even quit. Which leaves you with the problem of starting from scratch with somebody new.

And none of that solves the immediate problem and gets your guy to the worksite where everyone is waiting.

What To Do When Mistakes Happen

When mistakes happen there is only one thing to do.

Well, actually two.

1. Solve the problem
2. Learn from the mistake
​

The immediate need is to solve the problem. And make no mistake about it. As the leader, you were hired specifically to solve problems. It’s time to do your job.

​I wrote more about problem solving in The Lever #45. You can read it here.​

Problem solved!

The next step is to learn from the mistake so that it doesn’t happen again. Which means learning from the mistake and updating the system that the mistake happened inside of.

Because if a mistake is going to be a trigger for improvement, then there needs to be something that gets improved. That something, is your system.

How to learn from the mistake and apply improvements will be a topic for another day.

P.S.

“Mistakes are a trigger for improvement” is a mantra.

I say it so much that my team now says it back to me. Which is a good thing.

It indicates your entire philosophy about mistakes in a short phrase, which over time creates the environment for effective learning and improvement –> open sharing without fear of retribution.

If you play the blame game people won’t bring you their mistakes. So the mistakes will fester, get worse, and be harder to fix.

High performing leadership catches, corrects, and coaches early. But you can’t improve what you don’t know.