When leading a team, how we deal with a failure can have a huge impact on our team but also on ourselves in the short and the long term.

In his great book “Black Box Thinking” – Matthew Syed discusses this in the first part of the book where a tragic event happened during a routine operation which cost a woman her life. Syed goes on to contrast the approach to failure (and subsequent learning) between Healthcare and the Aviation industry.

Although most of us in our daily lives and jobs don’t deal with life and death situations, but we do deal with failure.

The way in which we act in the face of failure and the actions & decisions which contributed to it, can have a huge impact on how we, as individuals and as leaders, learn from it.

Why can it be so hard to admit or be honest about a failure?

Carol Travis – Co Author of Mistakes were made (but not by me) – discusses the concept of cognitive dissonance; she writes:

“Cognitive dissonance is what we feel when the self-concept—I’m smart, I’m kind, I’m convinced this belief is true—is threatened by evidence that we did something that wasn’t smart, that we did something that hurt another person, that the belief isn’t true.”

According to Travis, the only way to resolve the feeling is to “modify the self-concept or accept the evidence”

So as individuals and as leaders, accepting that a failure happened really is the first step to resolving it and to opening us up to exploring a potential solution.

Although we may not be personally responsible for a mistake as the leader, once an issues comes to light, it is our responsibility to get to the root cause and to resolve it WITH our team.

When you are a leader and a failure happens on your watch:

I touched upon this in another article I wrote about performance management but I wanted to add some key lessons here as well.

When you lead a team of people, chances are high that someone will make a mistake at some point under your leadership. It is important not to ignore the failure and hope that it will just go away because the conditions that caused the failure in the first place are likely to still be there.

Additionally, mistakes made by one employee, can cause additional work for the rest of the team, which is another reason why it is essential to not ignore mistakes. But… it has to be done in the right way.

Simon Sinek discusses the concept of the “Circle of safety” in his book Leaders Eat Last:  “Only when we feel we are in a ‘Circle of Safety’ will we pull together as a unified team, better able to survive and thrive regardless of the conditions outside.”

It is the responsibility of the leader to create that environment, to earn the trust of your team and to work with them and not against them when mistakes happen. It can be easy to carelessly blame your team for the mistake / failing, but that quickly dissolves the Circle of Safety and creates the exact wrong environment for a team to survive and thrive in the long term.

I have seen managers try to hold people accountable without taking care of the circle of safety and rather than creating an environment where people work together to resolve issues, the predominant drive is to survive, hide mistakes and work un-collaboratively.

Broadly speaking there are two approaches… which one would you pick? and is it the same as what you’d like your manager to choose?

1. Instantly blame the team / individual, formally reprimand them and tell them never to do it again
2. Discuss the mistake, understand the consequences surrounding the mistake, offer support to the individual and give them a chance to get it right. If there is repeat behaviour, then consider using a more formal approach (performance improvement plan, verbal warning, disciplinary procedure etc as appropriate)

Work with and develop others to enhance long-term performance

Use mistakes a precious learning opportunities… a way to look in to the Black Box and find out what caused the issue.

One of the biggest impacts you can have is to work with your team when an issue arrises, involve them in the problem solving process, listen to and learn from their ideas and then work work with them on the implementation and the coaching.

If you rush in and just do the job for them but offer no support or coaching then congratulations…you have taken the responsibility away from them to deal with that issue in the future while creating additional work for yourself forever.

An example:

I had an incident at a factory I was working at whereby several Tons of product was scrapped because of poor quality. Because of the complexity of the product and the process, there can be any number of things that could cause this issue (wrong ingredients used, wrong quantity of ingredients, substandard ingredients, mechanical failure, Quality checks not fit for purpose, Quality checks not carried out correctly etc etc…).

I had an inkling as to what the issue actually was through my understanding of the process which narrowed down the root cause to the Quality checks conducted on the product.

When I asked a few of the other managers how a particular check was conducted, their answer was “by eye and through experience…it’s always been done this way”.

This instantly set off alarm bells ringing in my head because products should have specific Key Quality Attributes that can be quantified and measured… otherwise what is the point of the Quality check in the first place and how can you expect anyone to come in to the business and be successful at that job?

So what’s the plan?

My plan was to put together a process confirmation routine, whereby every hour, I go around every station on the line and discuss the latest quality check with the operator at that station. By doing so, I can learn more about how the check is carried out, whether it is fit for purpose and also discuss the failure modes and what actions should be taken by the operator in the event of a failure.

By taking this action, I put myself through additional work in the short term with the aim of having less work to do in the longer-term as the team became better equipped to deal with issues themselves. Additionally, it shows that these checks are important to me, the leader, and further empowers them to take control of their work.

Forward on / Get in touch:

If you think this post can help someone then please forward it on to them. The recommended reads section on the main website has additional resources that you can use to find out more information on this topic.

As always please let me know if you have found this helpful or if you’d like clarification on anything in this post. I want to make these as valuable as I can to you, the reader.

Thanks, Alex