Doing and deciding guarantees mistakes.  Success and innovation require errors.   Mistakes are the price of progress.   They help us learn, grow, and excel.  They are normal, natural, predictable, and expected.  Everyone makes them.  The focus is to learn from and not repeat them.

You never want employees to be afraid to admit mistakes.  Even worse would be a culture which encourages them to hide them.  If this persists, problems multiply and the organization could experience a real crisis.  This was completely avoidable had small mistakes been effectively addressed when they actually happened.

Leaders – especially front-line supervisors – need to deal with mistakes when they occur.  If not, they are repeated by the employee and replicated by others.  The new policy means we do not follow the real policy.  Policies and procedures usually have solid rationales.  Either ensure adherence or change the policy.

When you speak with the member of the team, start positive.  Secondly, learn why they did what they did.  You want to understand their thinking and actions.  There may be a good explanation like direction from a prior supervisor who did not follow policy.  Confirm causes to select solutions.  Thirdly, identify what resources or remedies are needed to ensure policy compliance and employee success.  Fourthly, ask what you need to do as a leader to help them achieve the right performance.  Fifthly, go over why the mistake occurred, what the employee is expected to now do differently, and ensure a clear and mutual understanding.  Lastly, provide any needed tools or resources the employee needs to attain strong performance and make sure you as a supervisor or manager follow-up to confirm their positive progress.  Please end the conversation on an encouraging note.

The conversation is not the end.  Follow-up is essential after this meeting.  Observing the employee now and receiving reports about his or her performance are needed.  If the employee is adhering to the policy and doing a good job, thank the person.  Recognize the good performance in real time.  This helps ensure it will continue.  Please let the employee know you value that they learned and can see that he or she is now consistently doing it the right way.  If you are hiring the right people, they want to know they are succeeding.

If they don’t stop taking the wrong actions after your meeting with them, a different approach will be needed.  It must be immediately addressed.  Identify why this is still occurring.  Tailor the solution to the problem.

A “can’t” should have already been remedied with training and supervision after the first meeting on this issue.  Is this a “don’t” which is he or she is just not following the policy again which can have other causes and solutions.  Is it a “won’t” which is he or she has no intention of conforming their conduct to the job requirements and workplace expectations?  Both of these scenarios can involve progressive discipline or more consequential actions.  It could mean you have the right employee in the wrong role or an employee who should not have been hired.   Either way, leaders deal with it.

Supervisors and managers make two major mistakes.  They either ignore the problem or they come down too hard on a good employee.  Both undermine performance.  Allowing the same employee to not follow policies and procedures or fail to embrace the workplace culture also hurts teamwork and morale.  Our successes and failures as leaders are never invisible to others.

Your team must feel safe to admit and make mistakes. Leaders should be an example. If you are recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training as you should, employees will make mistakes, improve, and provide a solid performance during their careers.  Accept that mistakes are part of the process.  Let your team be free to fail, fail up, and fail forward (Abrashoff, 2002; Collins, 2001; Maxwell,1998; Starling, 2008; Welch, 2005).

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