Admitting mistakes early is the sign of a healthy organizational culture; the sooner you can fix any mistake, the less the cost in real expenses and reputation. That truth remains true for everybody from the CEO on down.
Katie Paine, Founder and CEO of the Delahaye Group, put it bluntly: “We all make mistakes. But what really makes mistakes expensive is not admitting them right away. Business culture teaches us never to admit to our mistakes but to bury them instead or to blame someone else.”
Second Danger
There is a second danger for those pursuing perfection. Many are so concerned about doing things perfectly that they settle for perfecting outdated processes and wait too long to embrace innovative, transformational change. To rest in the past and resist necessary innovation is a mistake that is important to confront.Again, candor and the ability to admit when you have such resistance to needed change is a true sign of effective teams in a high-performance culture. Yes, every change involves early errors, and, in that sense, are risks, but they are risks successful organizations must endure and honor.
Every successful change involves making a move, catching errors early, and making necessary course-corrections to make progress possible. Trying to avoid making those errors, or hiding the errors that do result, can hasten the demise of even the best organizations.
But how does a leader build an organization where it is easy to surface mistakes?
In the pursuit of strategic innovation, leaders can model transparency themselves by allowing the team to learn from their own mistakes. Can’t you just hear the inner thoughts of your team if you were to confess, “I made a significant mistake last week that I thought we could all learn from. After all, there is no point in our team paying the price twice.”?
You can also individually honor members of your team for good ideas even when they eventually prove unworkable. There was a 3M story that went around for years about a top executive who brought a team leader into his office to discuss some questionable results with a new product. The team leader was expecting to be confronted for a product that didn’t sell. Instead, he was confronted with a smile and a surprising message of support.
The executive reportedly said, “I wanted to bring you in here to congratulate you on your work. It’s hard to find new team leaders willing to risk millions and his own job on a well-thought-out but unproven product idea. I’m proud of you championing this investment. Don’t let this discourage you. We are built on a continuous stream of new innovative products. Some don’t work, but many do. Don’t let this stop you from fighting for your next one.”
Profiting From Failure
One innovative CEO from South Carolina had a unique idea that ushered in a plethora of innovative ideas. She wanted to develop a team that could honor even ”productive” failures. To her, it was what you learned from a failure that counted the most. After attending one of my leadership programs, she found a way to emphasize the importance of profiting from program failures that was very unique.She confessed over the phone, “You talked about the importance of surfacing errors and learning from them, and I realized that we just weren’t building a culture that was doing that. I also realized that unless I took a risk from the top it wasn’t going to happen.”
“That’s exactly what we discussed. As a leader, you have to model what you want,” I replied, proud of her resolve to actually put into practice something she had learned.
“We have regular executive meetings, and I decided to throw my team a constructive curve,” she confided.
“I waited until we had taken care of most of the critical items on the agenda, and then I put $100 on the table. I shared with the executive team a mistake I had made during contract negotiations with a key client. My off-target comments had proven difficult for the national sales team to recover from. We lost a lot of money because I had not taken the time to read the brief I was provided. I wanted them to learn from my mistake and collectively discuss how to make sure that didn’t happen again and how we might recover the client. I thought I had thought it through a future strategy, but some of their suggestions proved insightful and worthy of changing my plans. I let them know how valuable their input had been.”
“What was their reaction and where does the $100 fit in?”
“Many of them were well aware of my mistake, but some of them weren’t,” she continued. “I think they were just surprised that I took time at the meeting to talk about it. They were even more surprised by my follow-up challenge. I said to them, ‘You’re probably wondering about the $100 on the table. That’s for anyone in this room who can top my mistake.’”
“I’m sure some of them were thinking that. They were tentative at first, but soon got into it,” she confessed. “I mean, who wants to pass up $100?”
“What happened?”
“First, in looking at my mistake, they came up with an approach that actually ended up winning back the client I had lost. But then, we went around the room, and each person shared a mistake in judgment that they had made in the last month and what they learned from that experience,” the CEO continued. “I was amazed. One of the other executives said that it was the best $100 we had invested in training in years! He was right. We learned a lot about surfacing problems and learning from them. Since then, we’ve been taking time to share the lessons we’ve learned the hard way at every meeting.”
“Someone’s making money here,” I observed.
“Now, they’re sharing without the $100!” she replied with a laugh. “Hey, that was my $100! One investment was enough to make my point. After all, I didn’t want to encourage a competition for making bigger and better mistakes! In fact, in some meetings, people couldn’t think of one. That’s alright, too. We just wanted to make it safe to surface and learn from mistakes. It’s all about making timely course-corrections on the way to winning results.”
In short, as a leader who wants to be successful, take the trap out of excellence by striving for quality without waiting for the perfect thought, the perfect action, or the perfect time.
Let’s face it—you and your team won’t even do that perfectly! Build a team that is comfortable getting truth up and down the organization as quickly as possible and celebrate the journey together—the mistakes and the victories! You may not want to invest $100 but take time to think through how you can make sure your team is comfortable talking about errors and learning from them.
