EP#06 🌿Embracing Mistakes as a Key To Unlocking More Safety & Increasing Teamwork & Engagement

A mistake is a diagnostic moment for your entire culture. In one moment, in front of everyone, how you respond to someone stuffing up reveals whether what you say matches what you do, and whether it's actually safe to be honest in your team.

In this episode I share three real stories, including my own $100,000 mistake and what I did with it in a team meeting, how I handled an office intimidator’s major mistake with the same grace I gave everyone else and the moment my team talked over each other with feedback and I felt nothing but pride.

I walk through the research from Amy Edmondson, Rebecca Schaumberg and Brené Brown on what shame culture actually costs a team and the simple, practical moves that shift a team from guarded to genuinely engaged.

How you handle mistakes dictates the energy, character and loyalty of your team.

This episode shows you exactly what that can look like in practice.

EP#06 - Listen Now

Curious where your team stands?

Take the free Leadership Self-Assessment (6 minutes)

On with the episode...

Do mistakes in your team get quietly buried instead of openly discussed?

Are you worried that how you react to mistakes is creating more fear than learning?

Are slip-ups used as ammunition rather than an opportunity to support?

Welcome back.

Continuing on from the previous episode, how did I turn my $100,000 mistake into a reframe for celebrating them? And why it's another game changer to get your reactions to mistakes right. I've got three stories about mistakes and how they can be the turnaround for your team's rise in safety and trust in you as a leader. I'm wrapped your back.

Checking in, how did you go reflecting on where you or your team are at with safety and trust? Were you able to identify where you and your team were at against Dr. Timothy Clark's four stages of psychological safety? It's such an epic start to diving into the 26 core areas of teamwork that can be worked on to develop understanding, create growth, and start learning how to enjoy working together.

This episode is about mistakes. And it links in with safety and trust and I felt it needed its own episode as I believe that a mistake is a diagnostic moment for your entire In one moment in front of everyone, how you deal with someone's mistake reveals everything about whether what you say matches what you do, whether people are human or resources to you, and whether it's safe to be honest in your team.

All four things simultaneously in one moment.

Towards the end of this episode, I'll dive into ownership of my own mistakes and how it's also an epic opportunity to show your true colours as a person and a leader. It's humbling and powerful. So, how do you deal with mistakes? Do you sigh, do you lose it? Do you sigh? Do you shut down and get really tense? They're pretty horrible, especially if it's a massive mistake that can stop everyone's work, cost money, time.

We’ve all made mistakes. We will all continue to make mistakes. It's a common thread that we all have. That horrid throw up feeling when you realise you've made a mistake and then having to process the emotional reaction, knowing you need to deal with telling someone about it and what that might look like. It's pretty scary.

If you can, dealing with mistakes proactively, in a meeting away from when they occur, sets you up to have an initial reaction to a mistake, but recover well because the team understand that you view mistakes as an opportunity to fix, correct, or to celebrate that because a mistake has been made and highlighted, someone else will not go through the same thing again. That same gut-wrenching moment of mucking something up. Maybe that's difficult to get your head around when mistakes can cost so much, but eventually you remove the mistakes that shouldn't happen and build resilience to the genuine mistakes that happen outside our control.

A power cut shuts down a payment run, a system glitch kills an upload, a number is transposed, a message isn't clear. If we deal with the human stuff lightly and handle the other stuff as calmly as we can, that's a calm life in general. When you can deal with yourself in the same way, it just feels good.

On a deep level, I've really thought about why the way you deal with mistakes has such a big impact and I'm far from qualified to get into the actual psychology, but I think it is deep. When you're working with someone who has made a mistake, you're dealing with how they've grown into dealing with mistakes in their own life. That can be pretty traumatic for some. So evening out your own reactions has a deep impact and it's an opportunity to show compassion. understanding, patience, empathy.

When is there another opportunity to display those qualities to others, to extend support? Unfortunately, when something isn't going well for them in their life, so mistakes should be celebrated from a leadership point of view as they give you an opportunity to show that side of who you are without needing to be dramatic like real life can be. Support, care. The things that you need when you muck up or feel bad.

I think it can be so easy to reframe how you manage mistakes, knowing that's what you're actually dealing with. The mistake, the practical hustle through it, the mistake, not being the person.

Here's actual data when you're reframing mistakes rather than having a “you can't make mistakes” culture.

In an environment with low safety it was revealed in one survey that 85% of employees had withheld important information from their manager because they feared the consequences of speaking up. That's shocking for me and heart-breaking considering the opportunities that mistakes can provide.

Teams with high safety catch errors earlier, pivot faster, and provide stronger creative solutions and outcomes to problems or issues. Amy Edmondson, the GOAT in psychological safety in the workplace, advises in her research that safe teams report more mistakes, not fewer.

That's not a problem, that's the goal. The teams flying blind are the ones where no one wants to be the one to say it. But you want your team to speak up. And that is a clear signal and the markers for psychological safety that your team feel comfortable bringing things up.

Rebecca Schaumberg is currently an assistant professor of organisational behaviour at the European School of Management and Technology, Berlin. Prior she was at the Wharton School in Pennsylvania, and she is best known for her research on the role of self-conscious emotions in the workplace.

Her research while in Pennsylvania found that when someone is publicly shamed for a mistake, everyone watching learns the lesson too, not just that person. So that's critical in an open plan office when they can see what's going on, see how you react. If you deal with mistakes negatively, catastrophise, which is so easy to do when they're costly, imagine the impact personally on the person that already feels vulnerable.

On the team that witnesses someone being stripped down or told off, the faith in you will slowly seep away because your reactions might be over the top. The ideas that never get suggested, the problems that never get flagged, the near misses that become actual real disasters. Rebecca's work looks at the emotions such as shame, guilt or embarrassment and the impact on our behaviour. Taking those emotions away from your team and you when someone makes a mistake is like someone giving you water when you're thirsty.

Brene Brown's book Dare to Lead references gossip around mistakes as being a shame culture. Her distinction, guilt says I did something wrong. Shame says I am the mistake. When a leader treats a mistake as something a person is, rather than something that happened, that's when the gossiping starts and that's when you have the catastrophizing even more behind the scenes and when people shut down. That's where the ammunition comes from, and people that are toxic can feed on that, whether they realise they're doing it or not.

Gossiping is just rehashing, it's ineffective, and when I've addressed it, I fundamentally feel it's just unkind.

My hundred thousand dollar mistake was a classic example of how I used it turn it around and really highlight how I wanted mistakes to be dealt with. In this one I just transposed one too many zeros and not following a gut instinct that I should check that the amount was correct. It did seem high but not out of the question. Five seconds it would have taken me to double check and I didn't do it. One other team member checked my work, had the same gut reaction but didn't check with me, presumed I had done that and it was correct. So we processed the payment. The next day boss was asking me what the hundred k payment was for, which was weird because he'd asked me to pay it and signed it off. Dang. So there goes that gut wrenching feeling.

In a team meeting, I brought it up. We did have issues with mistakes not being highlighted, with team members falling on them at the end of the month or being blindsided with things that weren't balancing and having to unwind where the issue lay. It was also something that one held up as ammunition at times to assert control over others around them.

So I wanted to open up the conversation as mistakes really were the last thing our team needed to be concerned about. Our goals to achieve were big and the focus on negatives was a waste of time, energy and resources. So I told them what I'd done. I'd already said to the team that I wanted to deal with mistakes differently. This is my opportunity to show them what I meant.

I highlighted that the mistake wasn't my mistake it was when I had an inkling I should double check and I didn't. I emphasized that it's so much harder to fix a mistake than to put in double checks, to ask a quick question, than to just push ahead and screw something up. I set up a register, I wanted to track our mistakes. I expressed openly that I knew how it felt when you made one, a classic example. But we weren't gonna make it personal.

It's about the process and improving. We support someone who makes mistakes knowing how it feels and deal with things swiftly if the mistakes keep happening. And especially if we're not learning from them. No more pointing fingers, no more hiding when things go wrong.

I got so much feedback about that from team members. It left a really big impression. Which is why I wanted to split this off into a separate episode. I realised how much it meant giving us permission to just be human, but showing it was the proof. It's an opportunity as well, like I said, just to console or support someone and we all make mistakes. If reassurance comes from you, focus goes back into the work.

More performance, better recovery, way more efficiency, creating better processes, win win win. Love love.

In another situation, we had an team member who would really throw people under the bus when they'd made a mistake, or if they didn't follow the way they thought something should be done. One day, massive mistake. I was in a position again to put my money where my mouth is. My reaction was calm, and I brushed it off without missing a beat. I said, easy. Just go tell everyone to stop working and gather us all together and we'll tell everyone what's happening. We'll talk out the next steps. They were on the verge of tears, the anticipation of my reaction being unknown, it was making them pretty sick.

It wasn't something that could be hidden. And it was about three hours until it was resolved. Cost money to have contractors to unwind the mistake, downtime for the team, having to focus on other tasks, and at the time we didn't know whether it could be reversed. So that's a significant impact. But I handled her exactly the same way I would handle anyone else, despite knowing that they were the one person who behind the scenes really created fear around these types of situations.

We opened it up to the group, the focus went into the notes, and I also reminded them this person was feeling like shit, it was time to support. Having this happen again was a risk. Now we could plug it. And a reminder again to not wing it, slow down, double check. And another reminder that unwinding a mistake is far worse than making sure we hadn't made one in the first place.

So the person we're dealing with, they knew that I could have used that against them, but why? Like what's the point? And that's just mean. Those types of calm reactions and what you choose to focus on, especially with people that probably deserve written warnings that's class. Repeated mistakes, hiding them, lying, gossiping, that's disciplinary stuff for sure. When you've laid out this type of expectation and it isn't followed, that can just be done swiftly, without repercussions and the team will back your decision or action.

Taking the heat out of mistakes is how you dismantle a shame culture not through confrontation but through consistency and grace. In this situation, the power dynamic shifted. Quietly, in front of everyone, and I'm not saying I didn't want to scream into my pen the moment they walked out after they told me.  But I chose what to do with it publicly. And it made a difference in how this person also chose to show up.

Yay.

Last story before closing out. Owning another mistake I made as a leader. Proof for me that putting your hand up and just being vulnerable rather than being bulletproof creates loyalty and respect. In a standard team meeting, I'd emailed out a prior change that I thought would be beneficial. I brought up the change in the meeting, asked if anyone had anything to say about it, and I was bombarded with feedback and it wasn't good.

People were talking over each other, trying to get my attention. The energy went up. Someone put their fingers in their ears. But to me, to my ears, it was freaking magic. They were so passionate and engaged. They were sharing at the same time and it was appropriate. That's good culture. That for me was signalling safety and trust. Once my brain and my heart kind of sunk up.

I apologized. I should have spoken to some of the team before I just opened that up. I was truly sorry. And I said to the team that I would never do that again. If there was a change that I think would be beneficial, I promised I would talk it out with several people before introducing the idea. So I know there was chatter about my mistake before because the team fired up. Afterwards there was also chatter about the fact that I had apologized and made them a promise.

Promises don't come into business or workplace talk often. That's human, a promise is deep. In our next team meeting, I celebrated that situation as an example of how far we'd come as a team. Because when we first started out, feedback and open sharing was an absolute no no. Discussions happened over the water cooler with the door shut. I was incredibly grateful for the energy and the passion. I made a big deal of it because it was a big deal. I was about to lead us into something that would have crashed and made people unhappy and they saved that from happening. I was so grateful and the team genuinely knew that I meant it.

If you haven't already, definitely check out the YouTube clip from the Conscious Leadership Group. I mentioned it in a previous episode Above the Line, Below the Line.

Using mistakes as ammunition is below the line behaviour. So name it and this video gives you the language to call it out. It is poor behaviour without pointing fingers.

How you respond to mistakes is one of the most powerful cultural signals you'll ever send. The moment someone stuffs up, including yourself, and the whole room watches what you do next. The team you get is the answer to how you handle these moments. You build people up or quietly dismantle them.

Don't let someone get away with poor behaviour towards others in this situation. Especially if someone is feeling really vulnerable about what they've done, knock it on the head. I truly believe handling mistakes dictates the energy, the character and the loyalty of your team. You can't find those qualities in the spreadsheets or data, but it will be reflected in retention, optimization, resilience and an increased positive, buzzy, happy vibe that just starts getting better and better.

That's safety and that's trust when people start feeling more relaxed, better in their workspace, better with the person sitting next to them.

The end of another episode and wow it goes so quick. Your invitation for further thought today, do you think you handle mistakes constructively? Can you see how being open and creating safety and ownership around them can have a big impact on your team dynamic as well as the opportunity to improve data and efficiencies across the team?

If you haven't already, pop to theolivettreemethod.com and complete the leadership self-assessment.

Next episode I dive back into the second core area which is in that assessment and a fundamental one for your team dynamic. It's predictability and stability. Woohoo. We've dived into safety and trust and mistakes being what we've covered today.

I talk about how I believe that there are three other areas to your team which become the foundation of how you operate together. And that when you work on these specifically, they have multiple longer lasting effects across your team dynamic more than any other area that you can work on. Positive or negative. They're the big hitters. I can't wait to explore this.

Be blessed and I wish you the best workday. Ciao.

Resource Links:

Dr Timothy Clark (Book) – The 4 Stages of Psychological Safety - https://www.leaderfactor.com/4-stages-of-psychological-safety

Amy Edmondson (Book) - The Fearless Organisation - https://amycedmondson.com/books/

Rebecca Schaumberg - https://esmt.berlin/person/rebecca-schaumberg

Brene Brown (Book) - https://brenebrown.com/hubs/dare-to-lead/

Above The Line/Below The Line – Conscious Leadership Group

Next Episode...

Why Your Team Can't Focus; The Hidden Cost of Unpredictable Leadership on Teamwork and Engagement

EP#07 - Listen Now

🌿Not sure where to start?

Take the free Leadership Self-Assessment

In minutes, see exactly what's shaping your team right now.

🌿Ready to lead differently? Your next step…

The Olive Tree Method - reveal the conditions around your people.

If you don't know what's broken, you don't know what to fix.

I'm ready.

I need more... click here for further details.