How To Handle Failures At Work

You’ve heard the phrase, "don't poison the well."

It’s applicable to everyone, and especially impactful for team leadership.

Its origin is the 14th century Bubonic Plague - but generally is an ancient wartime practice of pouring poison into drinking water sources before an invasion, to diminish the strength of foes.

In business, the idiom refers to saying/doing something that irrevocably harms the whole team.

We’ve all dealt with toxic work environments - pun intended. We’ve all dealt with bosses or colleagues that behave nastily or untoward for no reason. But when it comes from the top, it trickles down - and it’s very hard to stop the stream.

It’s the biggest no-no in leadership.

Poisoning the well is adding salt to a wound, kicking someone when they’re down, generally being mean with no constructive end after a perceived failure. The result is venomous thermodynamics - volatile, negative energy disperses rapidly. It’s projection, and its a lack of courage.

The reality is, not? all of your colleagues or partners will have the same views as you. They have their own baggage. But it’s never a reason to degrade morale or do irreparable damage to team spirit.

How to deal with failure as a team without poisoning the well:

1. Open up space to be honest about the failure: fostering an environment thereafter to lower defenses in order to fully understand what the failure actually was and why it happened.
2. Set the stage for accountability: This is not pointing fingers or establishing blame. Every failure has individual, team and company accountability (identified during the project’s post-mortem brief), but once the team is aware of what went wrong (step 1),? all levels will become aware of the mistake. The well-defined failure will naturally inform that awareness. Jumping to conclusions about character and competence is not the way through this.
3. Put out the fire: Bring solutions, not problems. Hone in on the problem at hand, and keep in mind 99% of things are salvageable.
4. Find the solution: How do you make sure this doesn’t happen again? Predict future instances for problems like this. Pause, reflect, and triage the problem. FYI - it probably will, but the process of analyzing it and taking steps is the healthy route. Now, it happening a third time…
5. Reinstate trust: By that, I mean trust in your team to fail again. When it’s all over, validate the team, and instill the fact that how you deal with a failure is the true indicator of failure.

We must reframe a well-poisoning with empathy. Acting out, projecting (on the part of a leader especially) is simply fear.?

It’s lack of courage, courage to trust the team to take care of things. Courage to shirk the option of plausible deniability and get into the trenches.

1. Open Up Space For Grace

Give yourself - and your team - grace, specifically, when something goes awry at work.

The first step in preserving the sanctity of trust, morale and competency in your team is doing what we call a “post-mortem” debrief (AKA, reflection of what the heck happened).

“Poisoning the well” is saying/doing something impulsive during an emotional time - i.e. a failure - that irrevocably harms the team. Failures could be:

• Mismanaged projects
• Poor outcomes
• Missed deadlines
• Miscommunications in general

The truth of any matter considered a “failure” is that there is never one person to blame - it's always multifaceted: Individual, team and company.?

What tends to happen when trouble's-a-brewin', is fingers are pointed. People / teams are attacked, problems are highlighted with no solutions. Things are doubled down on even when people are already being hard on themselves..and once the well is poisoned, it takes a hell of a lot of backwashing and flushing to fix, if it can be fixed at all.

Where we must start in order to avoid “poisoning the well,” is opening up space for honest communication and understanding of what happened.

Defining the What and the Why

This starts, and ends, as a team. There might be some 1:1 conversations needed to further understand nuances of a problem, but the vibe and objective of this stage is the same:

Outline what happened without blame.

Painstakingly spell out what exactly was missing, late, out of order, mismanaged, and/or under or miscommunicated. Illustrate what the wrench(es) were, and get on the same page.

That’s step one. Next is finding out WHY.

“Why” something failed still excludes blame and accountability (the accountability stage is next). “Why is simply the objective reason that the "what" happened:

• Was correspondence lost/inaccurate/unsubstantial?
• Were roles defined inadequately?
• Was there insufficient oversight?
• Were team members out of reach because of a time difference, sickness?
• Was the project mis-scoped?
• Were team members on different pages about how they’d work together?
• Were details not double-checked?
• Was there an unforeseen technical difficulty?
• Was the project/task management infrastructure not robust or accessible enough?
• Was there a misunderstanding of expectations?
• Was there overwhelm from other projects, lack of bandwidth?
• Was something not documented?

Find the cogs, and find out why they happened, and do this with grace and understanding. This part is JUST to understand EXACTLY what happened and why.

Next is accountability - which is for future protection, avoidance, and refinement - not calling any individual out.

2. Foster Accountability

Everybody has to face the uglies when it comes to work problems - but the process doesn’t have to be ugly.

Webster’s Dictionary says accountability is “the obligation or willingness to accept responsibility for one's actions.” But when it comes to a problem in the workplace, it’s not “one,” it’s all, and iIt starts with a culture of shared accountability.

I like Range.co’s interpretation: accountability means “trusting in your teammates and knowing you can count on each other to get things done.” It’s not about owning your end of the bargain, but being transparent with your team throughout.

When something breaks down, it's about collaborating to not only figure out what exactly happened and why, but internally owning it on all levels.

Accountability is the second action item in preserving “the well” during failure at work. Once the team is fully aware of what went wrong (step 1), accountability should come naturally.

I need to harp on this: This stage is an easy place to villainize and jump to conclusions about character and competence. That’s NOT the way to establish accountability.

• It’s not “I want them to learn a lesson,” it’s “I want them to grow.”
• It’s not telling the people responsible that they f****d up.
• It’s those people, on all levels, UNDERSTANDING it from within.

Problems need to be tackled and accounted for as a team, not the individual. The post-mortem (post-project debrief) will unveil what constituents need to be accountable to what facets.

The first step - defining what went wrong and why - needs to be so well dissected that it actually inspires people to look inward from a genuine desire to be better.

Accountability isn’t an excuse -it’s integrity, and It doesn’t need to be an announcement or spotlight.

It should be an inherent process, which can only happen in a healthy culture. A good metaphor here for accountability vs. blame is:

“I can swim down into the ocean, and sink a little - but that’s different from tying a cinderblock to myself.”

What’s unavoidable here, though, is the reminder and insistence on behalf of executive leadership. The conversation amongst the team should reiterate this: it’s never just one person not doing things perfectly that create obstacles.?

Think about what you personally could have done differently to change the outcome. Then, it may be appropriate to have 1:1 discussions with people. The directive should be to do some introspection to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

That’s it.

Accountability is about instilling a culture of caring and introspection that makes troubleshooting seamless, vs. reactive.?

What’s next in the formula for handling a failure at work?

3. Putting Out The Fire

Don’t talk about the faulty toaster.

When I was scanning ChatGPT to compare its responses to mine for “how to put out a fire at work,” obviously I got literal responses, but there are serious correlations (and for a reason):

1. Step one is to activate the alarm system and contact emergency personnel.
2. Step two is to find the nearest exit, and assist anyone in harm’s way to evacuate and go to the identified rendezvous location.
3. Step three (if possible) is to use a fire extinguisher to put out the fire - if it’s still localized at its point of origin (as you’ve been trained, and if you have a safe way out).

Putting out a metaphorical fire at work (a time-sensiitve high-priority problem) might not be life threatening - in fact 99% of the time everything is salvageable - but it sure can feel existential.

These include dissecting what happened and why, and establishing accountability. *Perhaps in any given case, putting out the figurative fire comes before accountability, but that all depends*

Regardless, the first step is communicating that the toaster in the break room caused a fire ASAP to all powers that be - akin to sounding the fire alarm.

Bring Solutions, Not More Problems

When it comes time to actually addressing the time sensitive problem: bring solutions, not more problems. It’s human instinct to expand on a problem, extrapolate every adjacent problem for a full picture, etc.?

That part comes before you put the fire out: defining where it came from. But the real answer is to hone in on the problem at hand, not overcomplicate. The time for “while we’re at it,” or dragging other issues into the mix to make a case is not this moment.

It’s time for a rendezvous, and involving/saving everyone involved. The rendezvous is where the execution happens.

Is anything “safe” or worth trying to salvage? If so, where’s the fire extinguisher? You should use your faculties and training as a team member to bring as many solutions as possible.

It’s not the time to call out how if Janet hadn’t overcooked her toast in the breakroom, the fire wouldn’t have happened, and maybe someone should replace the toaster or shame Janet.

It’s about grabbing whatever you can safely, containing and mitigating the problem and moving out (/ forward).

This step is simpler, but as in the case of a literal fire, people lose their wits and act irrationally. But the goal is to assess the damage thus far, and determine if anything can be done to solve the immediate problem.

Don’t blame Janet, don’t distract yourselves with a pile of more problems. Don’t reiterate or introduce causes or rationale.

Find the source, salvage, attack and get out safe to start another fire.

4. Predict Future Problems

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” does not apply to workplace failures.

There's no place for shame! Mistakes will happen, and they probably will happen once again in kind. Three times is when deep introspection and action should be considered, but before that…

It’s on leadership to empower those first two failures. That’s how you ultimately find solutions to problems before they happen a third time, andhow you go from being reactive to proactive.

Predicting future instances of a problem and trying to avoid it happening again is proactive.?

"Avoid" being the key word.

This step requires calm reflection of the problem. This is after being reactive to the immediate issue, after it has been handled and everything has been done to salvage and repair.

Does it require better communication? Better SOPs? Better oversight? It could be a lot of things.

Look at the company, team and personnel level. Look for patterns.

Nerves should be tamed at this point, after thorough inspection of the “what,” “why,” “accountability” and putting out the fire. Now it’s a bonding opportunity, a shared collaborative experience intended to improve and refine.

At any of these four steps, there’s potential for blaming. For saying or doing things that cause unnecessary pain and grief - for poisoning the well.

A common vein throughout it all is courage,? patience, and trust.

5. Reinstating Trust

The final step in preserving the sanctity of the “well,” is reinstating trust. This really stems from healthy company culture, and courage - courage to trust your team to fail again.

After it’s all over, it’s time to validate. Tell everyone straight up that you are not scared of failure, you’re okay with it, and still trust them. You don’t look down on them.

How you handle the failure can be the true failure.

Don’t embrace plausible deniability - get in the trenches, embrace intimacy and communicate.

Sit with the discomfort, wade in the water, and stay down in it - know you’re not alone.Know that you can come to understand why things are our of your control, and try to recognize signs of them in the future.

Then let go of them. Remind yourself that what you’re doing is so much bigger than what you’re doing.

#poisonthewell #postmortem #courage #problemsolvingDon'