What if You Were Judged Like an Olympic Athlete: Why Mistakes Deserve a ‘Ruthless Autopsy’

Watching Team USA’s first gold medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics in the men’s 4x100 freestyle relay reminded me of an interview I did years ago with Glen Tullman, and more recently a talk I attended led by Pete Kadens. Glen and Pete were co-founders of a successful solar company called SoCore, and believe wholeheartedly that mistakes at their companies - at anyone’s company - should be analyzed very openly, essentially the same way we all critique an athlete’s performance.

Back in the 2000s, I wrote a book called How They Did It: Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America. As the title suggests, I talked with highly successful company founders and leaders about how they launched, built, and sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.

One of the stories stuck with me. It was the approach to calling out mistakes that was the hallmark of the management style of Glen Tullman.?

One of the billionaires profiled in my book, Glen has?invested in and/or co-founded more than 20 businesses over the course of his career. That includes the electronic health record and health information technology company, Allscripts, and SoCore Energy, a commercial solar panel installation company. After he sold Livongo for $18.5 billion to Teladoc, Glen went on to launch Transcarent, where he’s now working to reinvent the US healthcare system.

He believes in the concept of a ruthless – and public – autopsy of poor performance.

“I learned from my brother Howard that when you’re growing a company and somebody does something wrong, you can correct him or her individually and then one person learns that lesson. Or you can send an email to the whole company and the whole company learns that lesson,” he told me for the book.

I have to admit, it left me feeling a little queasy. But then I heard a similar story from Pete Kadens.?

Another serial entrepreneur – he founded Green Thumb, one of the world’s largest cannabis companies and was Glen’s partner back in the SoCore Energy days – Kadens was the speaker at a recent meeting of the National Association of Corporate Directors in Chicago.?

He shares Glen’s approach to very public, unvarnished performance analysis. He uses a document he calls “The Gauntlet Run” for hiring new employees at his companies.

It asks interviewers to give candidates a thumbs up, down, or sideways on such personal points as:

• Acts Humbly
• Radically Honest
• Uses Good Judgment
• Knows where they are weak and are willing to improve

(You can read the full list at the InterimExecs blog.) ?

The way life is evolving for me, I’m not ever going to take on a CEO role where I would have to pull that on dozens or hundreds of people. I’m not that guy – although I get it (and could invest in a company where the CEO is that guy).

In fact, one of the principles we know RED Team interim executives embrace is that they speak truth to power. When one of our interim or fractional leaders goes into a turnaround situation, for example, the first thing we hear when they report back is about listening. But once the go-forward plan is in place, it becomes a Gauntlet-style hard line: success is expected and failures require a ruthless autopsy. Doing it publicly might be painful for the person who made the error, but it means you only have to fix that mistake once.

And if you happen to be an Olympic athlete, it means the whole team learns from your mistake, increasing the chances you'll sweep the competition and take home gold, silver and bronze!