Look for the solution before the culprit
“A team that never reports a mistake is not a perfect team. It is a frightened one.”
The hiccup
A delivery arrives a day late. Nothing serious: the customer is annoyed, not lost. Yet within an hour the incident has gone round the whole building. The customer calls the hotline, the hotline calls planning, planning calls the carrier, and the boss calls everyone. At every step, the tone rises a notch. By evening the delay has been made up. The atmosphere hasn’t.
Throughout a career spent leading teams, I have seen the same thing again and again: in many companies, the slightest hiccup takes on absurd proportions. We forget that there are human beings in the middle of the system. People who can solve problems, but who can also get things wrong, have an off day, lose focus, have a difficult Tuesday.
Pressure has this in common with water: it always looks for the lowest outlet. It runs down the floors and builds up in the buffer jobs: the hotline, planning, logistics. They take it from every pipe at once: the delivery driver, the customer, the grumpy colleague, the boss in a hurry. Each person passes their tension to the floor below, and the end of the pipe has no one to pass it to. So it keeps it, until the day it walks out.
We ask human beings to work like algorithms. Then we are surprised that they wear out like human beings.
Nobody keeps things in proportion when afraid
We readily blame people for not being able to step back. As if keeping things in proportion were a character trait, handed out at birth along with eye colour. It is first and foremost the product of an environment. To step back, people need two things every day: to feel safe, and to enjoy coming to work.
Take them away and behaviour changes at once. Under the threat of sanctions, everyone protects themselves: they hide the mistake, prepare their defence, look for someone the blame might land on, ideally someone who isn’t in the room. When they feel safe, the same people relax, flag problems early and look for solutions. They are not different people. It is a different pressure.
In the 1990s, the researcher Amy Edmondson was studying hospital teams. She expected the best-led teams to make fewer mistakes. In the records, they had more. Not because they got more wrong: they dared to say so. A team that never reports a mistake is not a perfect team. It is a frightened one.
Pressure that is badly released doesn’t disappear: it leaks. Mistakes get hidden, problems come back, and the best people leave, since they are the ones with a choice.
The faulty gauge
Before acting on pressure, you have to read it. Yet the instrument everyone carries, their own brain, comes with bent needles. If hunting for culprits is so widespread, it isn’t because managers are nasty: it is because the device always leans the same way.
First needle: the fundamental attribution error. When someone else gets it wrong, we blame the person (“he’s careless”); when we do, we blame the circumstances (“I was swamped”). For ourselves we are mitigating circumstances; for others, textbook cases.
Second needle: hindsight bias. Once the mistake has been made, it looks obvious. Hence the “he should have seen it coming”, delivered with the confidence of a prophet who only predicts the past.
Third needle: negativity bias. A single incident weighs more than ten things going well. What works makes no noise; one leak whistles louder than the whole boiler.
These mechanisms are largely missing from management training. And knowing them is not enough to escape them: you can recite the list of biases and fall straight into them the next morning. What works is a pair: explain, then show. The explanation gives people the words to recognise the bias; a boss who corrects it in himself, day after day, proves it can be done differently. The practice comes down to one question. After an incident, the first one is “what happened?”, never “who did this?”.
The valve
Team members may, for fear of sanctions, look for a culprit to clear themselves. That is human. A manager has no such excuse. The job comes down to three verbs: put things in proportion, ease the tension, solve the problem.
The manager is the system’s valve. Standing between the team and senior management, between the team and the outside world, they absorb the unnecessary pressure so that it doesn’t reach the people doing the work. They protect the atmosphere and the pleasure of coming in each morning, which appears on no dashboard and can still be read on all of them.
But a valve is not a welded lid. Filtering is not isolating. A manager who keeps everything to himself creates a team that is sheltered and uninformed, and that will discover what is at stake on the day he is gone. A good valve lets through enough reality for the team to understand what is going on, and to grow.
You can lead people through sanctions. What you get is obedience: fragile, minimal, and it stops at the boss’s office door. You can also lead them through buy-in. Then they commit of their own accord, including when the boss isn’t there. Winning people over is not a gift; it is a choice, and it can be learned. It means reassuring, putting people at ease, giving everyone enough room to drop the mask without being blamed for who they really are.
Looking for the solution rather than the culprit is not kindness. It is mechanics.
Let’s be clear
Keeping things in proportion doesn’t mean accepting everything. People are not paid to have fun: they are there to deliver, at the level required. A pressure cooker without pressure cooks nothing, and a team without high standards doesn’t either.
The whole question is what the pressure is applied to. High standards apply to results: the figures, but also how people behave towards customers and colleagues. Kindness applies to mistakes. The two are not opposed; they share the work. Pressure that cooks feeds people; pressure with no way out explodes.
And tolerance can’t be decreed by internal memo. It is instilled by practising it. Teams copy what the boss does, rarely what he says, and usually with a faithfulness that would do wonders if applied to the rest of his instructions.
Questions for the road
This text won’t hand out a method: every team has its own pressure, and its own leaks. Instead, it leaves a few questions:
- After the last incident, was my first question “what happened?” or “who did this?”
- When my team reports no problems, is it because there aren’t any?
- What pressure did I let through this week that served no purpose?
- And the last time I got something wrong, did I blame myself or the circumstances?
Many managers have the title; few agree to be the valve. Yet that is where everything else is decided: looking for the solution before the culprit, and keeping a team that lasts.
Source: Amy C. Edmondson, “Learning from Mistakes Is Easier Said Than Done”, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 1996.