How do you encourage team members to take ownership of their mistakes?

Reframing mistakes starts with renaming them, by using words that don't suggest that something is completely lost, wrong, and irreparable. That reframing doesn't happen by chance or lucky accident. Organizations have to make conscious decision about growing learning-from-mistakes culture, and include all employees in this process. By doing that, they might be also opening safe spaces for trials and errors, or labs dedicated for "crazy project", in order to explore the seed of genius hidden behind the errors.

You have to create an environment of safety for the team. I have seen over the years the difference between teams that feel they can share, explore, learn vs those teams where people feel they have to get everything “right” - the difference in performance is marked. Where people feel safe there is much better performance of the team over the alternative.

As facilitators we do make mistakes…because we are human! Every time I apologize for interrupting someone (even if it’s to enthusiastically support what they are saying) I feel the room get much lighter and the willingness to engage higher. Demonstrating the actions and behaviors we want to see is a very powerful facilitating tool.

In my experience facilitating classes, I find out that it helps a lot when you are relatable. I never looked at my class from a place where I thought I was above them. I empathized with my groups, and I tried to show them how I made mistakes, worked with people to correct them, and learned from experience to try and overcome repeating them. Since I had been in a position as a trainee, I found it very easy to relate with my participants and show them that mistakes are not only part of progress, but owning them shows a different level of maturity that will boost their career and performance in the future.

A strategy that I have been using for years is to openly predict the mistakes people are going to make during my experiential learning exercises. They laugh because they think that now that they know what the mistakes are going to be, they can avoid them. Once the exercises start, however, the predictable human actions and behaviors take over, old habits guide decisions and, inevitably, a mistake is made! No one ever feels trapped or manipulated because they received a more than fair warning. More often than not, when I point out the mistake it is received by a laugh from the culprit. This allows a much easier transition to exploring why the mistake was made and how to avoid similar mistakes moving forward.