The Sisyphus Comments

Leaders Learn From Mistakes

Do you work at an agency where the organizational sport appears to be “blame shifting”. In many organizations, people are so afraid of making a mistake that they end up taking the only safe road, they don’t do anything.

When I was in field training, my FTO was sick one night so I was placed with another veteran officer. Early in the shift, the officer told me his philosophy on police work. He said, “No one has ever gotten fired here for “not” doing something. Its you young guys who come out here and want to set the world on fire that get in trouble.” As you can imagine, we didn’t do a lot of high quality police work that night.

Needless to say, I was happy when my regular FTO, Jack King (now Lt. King, the director of the Richmond Police Academy) returned to duty the next night. A lack of tolerance for mistakes in an agency is symptomatic of ineffective leadership. Face it, things are going to go wrong but when they do, true leaders don’t think of it as a failure. In fact, many highly successful leaders don’t even call it a failure, they use terminology like a “glitch”, “a set back” or “false start.”

Leaders who don’t view a mistake or a failure as something negative or irrevocable feel free to press on and, in the words of Clint Eastwood in the movie Heartbreak Ridge, “…improvise, adapt and overcome!” They view mistakes, both their own and those of the people who work for them, as learning experiences. After making a mistake, they can move on to some other idea with a higher probability of success.

One successful leader said, “If I have an art form of leadership, it is to make mistakes as quickly as I can in order to learn.”

Now does this mean that we accept substandard performance and repeated errors? Definitely not! There are two types of mistakes – mistakes of the head and mistakes of the heart. It is reasonable to expect near error free performance for routine and redundant tasks. However, when your high performers are pushing the envelope and learning new tasks, they should be comfortable with making mistakes during the learning process. These are mistakes of the head and they should be used as learning or teaching opportunities. Mistakes of the heart are failures that result from apathetic attitudes or from laziness. In these cases, disciplinary action may be necessary to stop the bad behavior before you can turn the corner toward productive behavior.

I am frequently asked whether it is fair to discipline one employee for a mistake while using a similar mistake as a teaching tool for another employee. My response is always the same – “There is nothing as unfair as treating unequal people equally.”