The Best Leaders Practice Both High Standards and Gracious Forgiveness

When I speak to business leaders about The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership, audience members always want to talk about one of them during the Q&A time. They find it hard to believe that effective leaders can hold their teams to high standards yet offer instant forgiveness when they miss those standards. How is this possible?

When Jack Welch was head of GE, he said, “We reward failure,” explaining that to do otherwise would only squelch daring to meet high standards. GM’s Charles Kettering liked to say that a good researcher failed every time but the last one. “He treats his failures as practice shots,” Kettering noted, adding that he himself had been wrong 99.9% of the time. We must strive to reach high standards and forgive failure.

Why Must Both Go Together?

Mark my words: the leaders who set their companies apart from others practice both. These uncommon leaders are sticklers for excellence, demanding more than team members feel they can even offer. In this sense, they’re almost inhuman. Their high standards separate their organization from others who can only emulate their great products or services. They have over-the-top benchmarks that put them in a league all their own—like Apple, Amazon, Zappos and Google. At the same time, these leaders balance their standards with a grace to forgive errors made by team members. They offer mercy to those who fall short, empowering them to recover and later rise to the occasion. This makes them human.

So, how do we build a culture and climate at work that embraces both?

Amy Edmondson wrote a book called, The Right Kind of Wrong. She talks about most leader’s predisposition to push for perfection. While it looks good on paper, targeting perfection without adding the ingredient of grace, makes people become worse. Research demonstrates people begin “faking” their way toward perfection since no one is perfect. Teams not individuals can be perfect. We must strive for perfection but settle for excellence.

When team members know their leader holds high standards yet is willing to forgive mistakes, it frees them to push themselves, take appropriate risks and initiate when they might normally hold back and play it safe. Regulations cause people to perform out of duty. Leaders with high expectations and a capacity to forgive mistakes, cause people to perform out of devotion. These are the two most common factors that motivate team members: duty or devotion. Leaders choose their follower’s motivation through their leadership style. Forgiveness is the emotional connection that allows a leader to hold high standards, gain effort and not lose their followers.

Usually, managers embrace one OR the other—and that’s a problem.

How Do the Best Leaders Do This?

The key is to change the environment in which your team operates. Bosses often fail to discern how much their teams refuse to admit mistakes and correct them because they’re afraid. Hiding errors does not get you to your goal. Dr. Amy Edmondson tells of two hospitals that underwent a study to discover what lowers mistakes by their nursing and medical staff. The hypothesis was that better teams with higher morale make fewer mistakes. They found that staff with high morale and good teamwork seemed to make more errors than other teams. It was baffling until they dug deeper to discover why. They found that better teams don’t make more errors; they are just more apt to report them. Both hospitals made errors because their staff is human. But most of the time, staff will not report their mistakes for fear of punishment or even termination. The best teams, on the other hand, reported mistakes quickly allowing everyone to remedy those errors and get better results in the end. The chief lesson? It’s the forgiveness of errors, not their elimination, that leads to fast resolution and excellence.

In addition to forgiveness as the norm, great organizations give permission up front to find mistakes, not just make them. The key is giving permission to everyone from the beginning. The most vivid illustration of this is Toyota’s “Andon Cord” which is positioned right on the auto assembly line. It’s a cable that any employee can pull when they spot a potential problem. Nothing on the assembly line stops, but a team leader approaches the employee and asks: what do you see? Often nothing needs attention, but if a flaw needs to be fixed, they’ll stop the work and fix it. Toyota doesn’t see this as a cost but as an investment. Problems are solved quickly, and they save millions of dollars every year. Just the presence of an Andon cord communicates that they want to find and solve problems, not avoid them.

Try This Exercise

Every few years, our team does an exercise to identify our mistakes or problems that have normalized. (You’ve likely heard the term “the normalization of defects.”) The exercise involves identifying our products, services, and systems and reviewing them with these questions:

• What needs a facelift? (It works well but just needs to be updated or upgraded)
• What needs an overhaul? (The original idea was good, but methods must be improved)
• What needs a funeral? (While the idea was once helpful, it no longer serves a purpose)

This exercise not only enables us to upgrade our work, but it creates a culture of risk and grace. Caroline Wanga was the 2023 TIME Woman of the Year. She admits she struggled early on with this balance of failure and forgiveness—even for herself. To quiet what she calls her “inner saboteur,” Wanga created a high threshold for failure: She gives herself five fails a day. It’s only if she reaches a sixth fail that she considers it a bad day.

This article is inspired by the book,?The Eight Paradoxes of Great Leadership, available anywhere books are sold.