Alive and Well at the End of the Day, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 20MISTAKES MANAGERS MAKE

Organizations don’t have memories. People have memories.

—Trevor Kletz

In life there are two ways to learn: the easy way and the hard way. The hard way is to learn from your mistakes. We all experience life firsthand, and everyone makes mistakes. Supervisors, managers and executives also spend a lot of time dealing with the mistakes their followers make. It comes with the job. Like their followers, leaders are human and make their share of mistakes, too. The mistakes leaders make look different—because they are different: leaders aren’t the ones with their “hands on the tools.” Their work is to plan, lead, organize, and correct. If that sounds like continuous improvement, it is not a coincidence.

The problem with learning from the mistakes you make as the leader is their cost: yes, you will learn—and learn a lot more from failure than from success—but making a big mistake can ruin the lives of your followers and wreck your career. The easy way is to learn from the mistakes of others. The tuition is free, but there is a prerequisite: you have to find out all about them.

All too often mistakes made by managers are quietly buried (“The COO is leaving the company to spend more time with family”), referred to as the unintended consequence of change (“In our focus on global competitiveness, we lost focus on basic execution”), or spun into some kind of mixed success (“The failure was a by‐product of our can‐do culture”). Sometimes a failure is referred ...