The Art of Project Management

12.7. Trust and making mistakes

It's easy to trust people when they succeed; managing people's mistakes is much more complicated. This is where managers earn their pay.

I know from my own experience that every time someone showed up at my office door with a problem he caused, I'd try (but not always succeed) to maintain three thoughts:

1. I'm glad he's coming to me about it. I'd rather he come to me instead of hide it or try to solve it on his own and make it worse. I should let him know this right away.

2. How can I help fix whatever this problem is? Is it even fixable? What are the options? How involved should I be? I should give him as much advice as he needs, but, if possible, have him carry out what needs to be done. However, I have to make sure he's not in over his head. Sending him back into the fire with a 99% certainty of death isn't exactly good management practice.

3. I need to make sure that if there is a lesson here, he'll learn it.(2) Mistakes are where real learning happens because the mistake maker has a personal and emotional investment in what happened, and he will have tremendous motivation not to repeat it (especially if he feels that the team trusts him).

If you ask any wise masters of any discipline for their great lessons, they will tell stories about how they screwed something up, probably an important thing, and finally learned a better way to go about doing whatever it was. It follows that to become great, you not only need to make mistakes now and then, but you ...