Everybody makes mistakes, right?

Everybody makes mistakes, right?

In our modern high speed society with a high need for flexibility and self-leadership, it is inevitable that we will make mistakes or total failures just because of that. Modern leadership preach that we should have a “mistake friendly” culture and almost encourage people to make mistakes – “just look at how Post-It notes was invented”. Well…

There are so many platitudes said about failures and mistakes. Like the one above: “Everybody makes mistakes”, which is not completely true. We all know people with an annoyingly good judgment who would never screw up. Or why not “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results”. Well, ask someone who tries to memorize a Mozart concert on a fiddle and play the same piece of music thousands of times. I think he or she would say that this is called practicing in daily life.

The Cambridge dictionary definition of (the noun) mistake is “an action, decision, or judgment that produces an unwanted or unintentional result”. (And for sure, the result might be “unwanted” but that is sometimes of course an understatement, just ask the operator at Chernobyl).

People tends to view shortcomings very differently, while some claim them to be so embarrassing so we would never show our face at work again others would not mind telling about them loudly at the cantina.

So why are we handling the mistakes so differently?

The way we, as individuals, look at our own performance and mistakes differs a lot. There are many factors that define our reactions and emotions of our mistakes and shortcomings. As with many other things in life, we are driven by our mysterious self-esteem. One way of looking at this is to use the model from Irena Makower, associate professor of psychology and a psychotherapist, and to simplify this use three levels of self-esteem: authentic and well developed, low, and failing or unsecure self-esteem. (Her model includes a much larger matrix than this and it would be a huge mistake if I tried to summarize it….)

For example, a person who has a failing or insecure self-esteem would take a mistake as a personal failure. He or she would measure himself by this mistake and try to hide it and feel depressed or as a total mess-up. This would then risk to cause a behavior that will spend a lot of calories on avoiding all failures and mistakes in the future no matter of that we have declared our culture to be “mistake friendly”.

On the other hand, a person that is residing an authentic and well developed self-esteem is looking at (most of) the mistakes as a guide on how he or she could achieve a personal goal. Setbacks are very important pieces of information on how he or she shall improve to reach that goal. Where the person with failing or insecure self-esteem tries to hide the mistake and see it as a personal setback, the person with well developed self-esteem will consider it as very valuable information.

So, when we speak about a mistake or failure friendly organization, we must understand that an employee will see, handle and value mistakes totally different and in the end it will all boil down to a matter of leadership.

In a high-performance organization, the ability to see individual characteristics is important. The challenge would be to give the right persons long leash while others would like to act in more secure environments. Rule is, do not push the wrong people out of their comfort zone. When we do that, we see a much higher risk of burn out of those who are equipped with a low or failing self-esteem since they might measure themselves from what they do (and not who they are) and take it as a personal failure. (This is somehow the same phenomena as the performancebased self-esteem.)

So, how shall we then make sure that we can handle our mistakes and make sure we give the right conditions to our employees?

Well, as always, there is a possibility to include this in your company handbook, the value statement, the “ten leadership commandments” or whatever you practice. And it would come down to a matter of trust, you trust people to make their own judgements, to take decisions based on their competencies and responsibilities and state of self-esteem. You trust people.

One way of doing that is to state this to the organization:

You all have the right to make mistakes, and the obligation to learn from it!