Manage Mistakes
Just what is terminal stupidity?
By A Business2Business Roundtable
Date Published: 9/1/2014
The diner swallowed her
first spoonful of the restaurant’s soup. “Oh.…” Eyes snapping wide, a hand
covering her mouth. “Uhhh … it’s … it’s burning my lips.” Tearing, her words
hoarse, she struggled to clear her throat. “Uh … MY GOD!” she screamed pushing
back from the table, blood seeping below the palm covering her mouth. Before
passing out, the woman coughed violently, spraying blood over horrified
friends.…
An investigation later
revealed that a kitchen worker mistakenly mixed a plumbing fluid containing the
crystal form of lye, sodium nitrate, sodium chloride, and aluminum into the
water used to prepare the customer’s broth. The victim’s alive but burns
destroyed her voice box along with a significant part of her mouth and
larynx.
“Let him who is without
mistake cast the first pink slip.”
—Poor paraphrase
Dictionary.com defines
mistake: “An error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor
reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc.” The investigators of the
woman’s tragic poisoning concluded that there was no intent on the employee’s
part to cause distress to anyone. She thought that the sink where she spilled
the residue of the toxic substance was empty, failing to see the pan with water
that was later used in the soup’s preparation.
Intent versus action …
what does a manager judge when considering the appropriate reaction to an
employee’s mistake? In this litigious world, we asked a panel of our own Business2Business
Magazine experts for their advice on their conclusions to the question, How
to manage mistakes?
Our Business2Business
Magazine panel of management experts: Leadership writer Shawn Doyle, HR
writer Ira Wolfe, Life Lessons writer Steve Cornibert, publisher Steve Schulz,
and editor Ted Byrne represent over a century of combined management
experience.
“Some of the worst
mistakes in my life were haircuts.”
—Jim Morrison
“It’s important to
remember two things here,” Ted Byrne began. “First off, we’re dealing with the
personnel issue, the after-the-fact moments when managers work with the
employee who erred. And secondly, we’re discussing mistakes that
occurred without any intention to create mischief.”
“Yeah, make that clear,”
Shawn Doyle added. “These are not cases that call for reprimand nor punishment.
What’s important is managing outcomes.”
“Right,” Ted agreed to
nods around the table, “Manager’s manage, they aren’t in the ‘justice’ or blame
business. Their job is to maximize successful outcomes—outcomes upon which they
themselves are evaluated.”
“Good judgment comes from
experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
—Rita Mae Brown, Alma
Mater
“For me,” Steve Cornibert
put in, “it’s important to clarify the word mistake. Some might argue, for
example, that it is a mistake to falsify production sheets, or time reports.
Actually, that’s fraud. There, intent is crucial. Instead what’s important here
is the mistake of, say, spilling coffee ruinously over a keypad, or entering
the wrong information onto a critical shipping label. Once upon a time in
college I recall learning that when you have an employee with goals that
differed from your organization their mistakes can be terminal, when their
values match the organization’s … tolerate them. It’s been a useful
perspective.”
“Those that don’t make
mistakes, don’t make nothin’.”
—Peter Drucker
“There are those who
wonder who owns a mistake, the employee who made it,” Ira Wolfe added, “or the
management process that allowed it? I recall that Warren Buffet taught us, ‘A
manager gets people to do what he wants them to do, while a leader gets people
to want to do what he wants them to do.’
Leaders will get people to
internalize the negative impact of a mistake. But, management mustn’t become so
draconian that it attempts to make mistakes impossible. You want people to have
a growth mindset, not just to do good but to do better … to try. Trying will
result in some mistakes.”
“Uh-huh, that’s the narrow
line,” Steve Schulz concurred. “The one between encouraging growth and shutting
it down along with morale. When tolerance disappears so does incentive.”
“I never made a mistake in
my life; at least, never one that I couldn’t explain away afterwards.”
—Rudyard Kipling, Under
the Deodars
“But,” Ted Byrne asked,
“at the core of things, is there such a thing as a terminal mistake? A firing
offense, regardless of intent?”
“Depends upon the Reasonable
Person Standard,” Shawn Doyle replied. “Did the error occur in an egregious
violation of well defined HR policy? There are some mistakes … which everyone
agrees … to which a ‘Reasonable Person’ would conclude … resulted from behavior
that was not just unwise but that resulted in a financial, liability, and
safety impact that is intolerable: Someone tossing lye carelessly into a common
sink, for example. A Reasonable Person would conclude firing that
employee is not a punishment, it’s more like self defense. People can be
terminally stupid.”
“I can recall firing a
manager,” Ted Byrne added, “who was a serial mistake maker. But it wasn’t any
one of his mistakes that triggered the decision, rather it was my conclusion
that I couldn’t manage him. And since managers are hired to manage toward
successful outcomes, I concluded that he made my job impossible.”
“There are companies who
have the Three Mistake Rule.” Shawn Doyle said. “If any three are made
in a certain period of time, the employee is out regardless of intent or
circumstances.”
“Smart people learn from
their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of
others.”
—Brandon Mull, Fablehaven
“Yeah,” Ted Byrne agreed.
“I recall working for a major television broadcasting network which only hired
graduate engineers to operate their central boards. If they were responsible
for three mistakes in a twelve month period which affected the transmission of
network material in real-time, they were terminated and their union contracts
were no protection. At their level the dollar costs were enormous.”
Ira Wolfe agreed, “There
are minor mistakes with major consequences. And it’s not unusual that
management sanctions an employee not because of a mistake but because it
resulted from carelessness. But be careful here, management is not in the
punishment business. Punishment is an emotional response. Management seeks
instead to hold people responsible for their responsibilities. No good will
come of punishment, managers need to manage their emotions to manage outcomes.”
“There is nothing wrong
with making mistakes, but
one should always make new ones. Repeating mistakes is a hallmark
of dim consciousness.”
—Dave Sim
“Effective managers
connect actions with consequences in the minds of their people,” Steve
Cornibert said. “If someone is dumb enough to smoke dope each morning they’ll
be fired eventually but not for smoking dope. Very often a problem fires
itself. We can’t forget though that just as often a mistake has value as a
teachable moment. If you mistakenly forget to set a limit to a company’s
production oven’s temperature then go home for the night, the arrival of the
fire company will teach you what never to do again.”
Ira Wolfe went on, “We
live in a litigious time where the Act of God or the Sh*t Happens
defense no longer works to defend a company against liabilities for an
unintended error … a mistake. If you want your workforce to do what you want
them to do, guidelines and rules are necessary. Plus your lawyer might need
them in a civil suit resulting from a mistake. Tolerance for the stupid and
ignorant mistake is situational. It depends a lot upon its impact.”
“We learn from failure,
not from success!”
—Bram Stoker, Dracula
“And a lot does depend
upon the attitude of the person afterward. Remorse will affect things. The
trouble comes,” Shawn Doyle warned, “in judging the sincerity of the employee’s
response. In fact, it’s equally important to judge how instructive the results
of the mistake were. A management overreaction can kick up the costs to morale.
And mandatory sentencing, so to speak, will limit employee growth.”
“We can learn from
mistakes before we make them.”
—Anon
“There’s one lesson I’ve
learned about all of this over the years,” Steve Schulz concluded. “Serial
mistakes are a management problem.”
“A bachelor is a guy who
never made the same mistake once.”
—Phyllis Diller
