Changing your rules of belonging: mistake tolerance
Think back to the last time you tried a new approach at work, and it wasn’t successful. Did your boss and colleagues criticise you? Did they complain to each other about how you should
have known better or how they would have done things differently? What impact did that have on you? My guess is that you thought twice before trying the next new thing. Maybe
you hesitated when someone suggested you be part of a new initiative or contribute to their thinking. Maybe you put your head down and ‘looked busy’ for a while as you licked your
wounds and recovered.
We’ve all been part of a team where someone makes a mistake. Often that person is us. One of my favourite sayings is:
‘The only people who don’t make mistakes are the people who don’t do anything’.
Spoiler alert: ‘perfect’ is not a thing; it is unachievable. People who hold themselves to a standard of perfection are typically among the most miserable on the planet.
Mistakes are inevitable. How you deal with them is what matters.
There are many, many books written just on this topic, and rightly so. How you deal with mistakes is a critical indicator of how safe your people feel they are to do all sorts of things,
including experiment. If people’s mistakes are punished, their belonging is lowered and, not surprisingly, they do what they need to do to keep themselves safe: they stop experimenting;
they stop sharing new ideas; they stop questioning the status quo; and they stop admitting weaknesses. They also start hiding their mistakes, with sometimes devastating consequences.
Amy Edmondson and Zhike Lei’s work on psychological safety is particularly relevant here. In their article in The Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior
they say: “A central theme in research on psychological safety – across decades and levels of analysis – is that it facilitates the willing contribution of ideas and actions to a shared enterprise.”
In other words, if you don’t provide a psychologically safe environment, your people will not provide you with the innovative ideas and actions that are critical to the execution of
your strategy and to future-proofing your organisation.
Often when I’m having these conversations with leaders, they get very nervous about the idea of tolerating, let alone welcoming or in any way celebrating, mistakes. They say things
to me like: ‘But I don’t want my people to make mistakes. What if they make a really big mistake that damages our relationships or reputation?’
I understand that this is a difficult area. It’s tricky because making mistakes is one of the fastest ways for people to figure out if they’re safe in a team, and simultaneously one of the most important ways for teams and organisations to stay relevant in this fast-changing world. As a leader, you want your people to feel safe so they can give you their best work. And, ideally, you also want them to make zero mistakes. Sadly, this is completely unrealistic; the two ideas are simply incompatible. No-one gives their best work unless they know they are safe to make mistakes and have those mistakes treated as learning opportunities instead of ‘sins’.
That said, the learning part of this idea is crucial. If you have someone who is making the same mistake repeatedly, you have a different kind of problem. If your team members are constantly making mistakes and don’t seem to care about damaging your team’s or organisation’s relationships or reputation, that means your mistake tolerance is currently set too high. It will be very important to adjust this carefully so as not to go too far in the opposite direction – but adjust it you must.
If you haven’t yet had a conversation with your people to determine your current setting on this dimension, as a rule of thumb you can be pretty sure that if you’re not already uncomfortable with the level of mistakes in the team (provided they’re learning from them), you’re probably holding on too tight.
Here’s a typical example of moving from current to desired state around mistake tolerance.
The rule we have now: We earn belonging around here by avoiding mistakes at all costs.
The impact of this rule: We play it safe all the time. We never experiment with new ways of doing things because the chances of getting something wrong are far higher. We don’t offer new ideas or question the status quo. We criticise those who make mistakes.
The problem: Our strategy is to evolve with our market and make sure we’re always improving our offers. If we don’t keep experimenting and learning, we’ll fall behind and won’t be able to compete. Without mistakes, we can’t learn fast enough.
The goal: To increase our mistake tolerance.
The rule we want: We earn belonging around here by learning from our mistakes.
If you want to change the culture of your team, you have to change the rules of belonging.