Thursday, April 15, 2010

To Annihilate or Not to Annihilate - That is the Question!

As leaders, everyday we face the challenge of negotiating between giving grace and driving accountability. Let’s face it; it’s hard to figure out when to let someone’s mistake slide and when to drop the hammer. I believe that once you understand that they can both co-exist, you can begin to use them advantageously.




Pretend that one of your crew members makes an honest mistake and goes too fast or gets too distracted and their error ends up costing you money. Your first option is to take them aside and completely berate them making them feel embarrassed and stupid. This type of approach obviously leaves a lasting memory, which unfortunately costs you a fair amount of chips of trust from the leadership poker table. The error-maker will clearly understand that you could care less about them but more their result. Is this bad? It surely is debatable because this is a play in many leaders’ playbooks. The only motivation stirred up in this example surrounds not getting yelled at again. There is no real change – only temporary improvement.



Let’s start this crazy train over. Johnny Too-Fast makes a mistake and instead of completely burying him you choose to take him aside and ask some questions surrounding what happened. “Tell me what happened.”, “What prevented you from catching the mistake?”, “Are you aware of how this type of error affects the team?”, or “How could we change our system to avoid this type of shortcoming in the future?” Some may say that this is a weak approach, but look at what happens. The employee sees that you care about the error and you respect them enough to treat them like a human being to dig deep through the layers uncovering real issues while partnering with them to create a solution.



In our business we call this “training money at work”. Good employees will not make the same mistake twice, and we all know that we learn more from failure than from success. Regardless of what bucket in the P&L you realize the loss, whether gross profit or training expense, it is still an opportunity to learn and grow.



I would argue that this type of approach also shows grace. Grace is giving someone something they don’t deserve. Johnny didn’t earn nor deserve this type of response, but you can still give it to him anyway. People usually feel bad and embarrassed when they make a mistake. Addressing issues like this are always golden opportunities for the leader to build greater leadership equity.



Part two is the next challenge because accountability can never end. If problems continue to repeat themselves, I believe there is a different problem. It’s either a bad internal system or a mismatched employee. Either way, you will be faced with a handful of tough decisions as you look at your business. The point though is to drive grace-filled accountability. Therefore the next time you have a chance to really light someone up, push the pause button, think it through, sprinkle some grace on it, and see if you get a different result. The outcome may surprise you.

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