An important leadership lesson from big mistakes

The Daily Drip

A few years ago, one of my direct reports came to me with a problem.

He had approved some concept art with me and sent it into production. Something went wrong with the prints and he made a last-second decision about the artwork to fix it.

The decision went against a policy we had in place with one of our partners. They were a big partner. Their name starts with "in" and ends with "tel."

When the prints showed up, needless to say, I pulled him into my office.

We talked about what went wrong--sure.

We talked about what we could do differently next time--sure.

But that wasn't the value of the conversation.

The value of the conversation came from a few things:

1. Getting comfortable with the pain.
It's bad and you need to feel the pain of this decision. I'm not going to tell you everything is okay and I'm also not going to fire you. This part of the conversation is stressful but by feeling the pain of this decision, you will better remember it.

2. Feeling safe in a work environment.
I'm not going to tell you you're stupid and that I would never have made that mistake. I understand where your decision came from. I'm not going to score this as a "miss" on an invisible ledger, either. There's no "three strikes" rule or anything, here. This is just development. I will never fire you for making a bad choice.

3. Letting him know that I'm not perfect either.
I want you to walk this off and get back in the game. Next time, when you screw up something really big, I'll tell you about the time I lost $10k in my Neuroscience lab and had to fight to get it back. And when you mess up bigger than that I'll tell you about the time I messed up a $60k website project.

I'm not saying this is a perfect approach but it certainly is human-centered and value-based.

The more we create a culture of "whose head will roll when this goes wrong" the more we will see people hiding information, being stressed out and unproductive at work, and making "safe" non-innovative decisions.

What's a great leadership moment you remember? What about it made it so impactful or formative?

It's up to all of us to lead each other, 24/7/365, in or out of our work lives.

See you out there on the field.