Ignore mistakes?

Dear Bob …

I think you missed a bit in this week’s Keep the Joint Running (“Creating a learning organization, 11/26/2007). Granted this is a controversial subject and hard to solve in a column.

From your column:

“That means consistently praising everyone who identifies mistakes and takes the lead in fixing them, without ever paying the least bit of attention to who made the mistake in the first place.”

That works great in the grand scheme of things, but it create three major issues:

1. Team morale suffers if the same person(s) continue to make the mistakes.

2. Your best people burn out because they are always fighting someone else’s fire.

3. Since solutions are celebrated, people start to work around the problem areas.

In theory I somewhat agree with you. In reality, I still think that good leaders need to give some folks a dope slap every now and then to wake them up. Or as the not so good Good to Great book notes, you need to have the right people on the bus.

Personally I like working for a leader who encourages solutions but will also jump up and down when things aren’t going well. The level of the reaction is tied to the degree of the issue and parties involved.

– Mistaker Staker

Dear Vlad …

We’re more or less in agreement.

We’re talking about a tough balancing act for any leader. The trick, I think, is to separate the process of handling incidents from the process of managing employee performance.

When a problem arises, everyone’s focus should be on what’s needed to take care of it – nothing else. When a manager sits down with an employee to talk about job performance … something that should happen on a regular basis … that’s another story. What’s particularly difficult, of course, is understanding what really happened. It’s rarely as cut and dried as “Fred made a mistake and it caused serious problems.”

Very often, Fred made a mistake because:

• Fred was juggling too many top priorities

• Three people interrupted each others’ interruptions, requiring Fred to switch from one task to another instead of being able to focus on one to get it done.

• Fred’s mistake was being required to handle a task the way someone else wanted it handled instead of being allowed to just get it done.

• Fred is a potentially good employee who has been put in the wrong role.

• Fred is a potentially good employee who thought he knew how to handle a task but really didn’t.

• Fred is a potentially good employee who thought he wasn’t supposed to ask for help when he was out of his depth … an employee who needs coaching.

Holding someone accountable for an honest mistake is rarely … probably never … a good idea. Removing someone from a position in which they aren’t succeeding is an entirely different matter.

– Bob

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