Don’t Keep Mistakes Behind Closed Doors

Again and again, I tried to protect my employees when they made a mistake.
Again and again, it backfired.

When I stumbled upon problems and mistakes, my instinct told me to keep them between me and the employee. I was trying to protect them. Help them keep face. Avoid any sprinkle of embarrassment. But often, this turned out to be a massive disservice to the organization — and, ultimately, to the employee as well.

I learned this lesson the hard way: leaders shouldn’t keep their employees’ mistakes behind closed doors. If we do, we’re creating multiple problems.

First, the rest of the team will get robbed of a learning opportunity. If they don’t know about a mistake, they cannot learn from it.

Second, the rest of the team will have no idea that there are problems with that teammate. Thankfully, problems only rarely grew into something more serious… but once every few years, I indeed had to fire an employee. Since I had kept any problems between me and that person — trying to protect both them and the team — the rest of the team was completely taken by surprise.

Third, the employee is being robbed of the accountability that mistakes actually should entail. The best way to deal with a mistake is to take responsibility, talk openly about it, and get support from your teammates to fix it and learn from it.

Avoiding these problems is in everyone’s best interest. But how can we deal with mistakes in a more transparent way? How can we make them publicly visible — without “shaming and blaming” the person concerned?

Three things worked particularly well for me in the past:

1. Start with yourself — Before you dissect someone else’s mistakes in public, start being transparent about one of your own. Open up about what happened and ask your team for ideas and help on how to best deal with it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. If you do this often enough, talking about mistakes will become normal in your culture.
2. Switch to an “us vs. the problem” perspective — Our default mentality when dealing with a mistake is “I am right. You are wrong.” But this is doomed to trigger defensiveness and conflict. A much healthier and more productive way is to take an “us vs. the problem” perspective.
3. Keep your intention front and center — This is closely connected to the previous point; but it’s so important that it bears clarification. Your intention must be to solve a problem, learn from the situation, and help prevent it in the future. Your intention is NOT to blame and shame. The mistake itself matters; who made the mistake should be almost irrelevant.

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Admittedly, this process requires sensitivity. We certainly cannot drag our colleagues’ mistakes into the light by force. But keeping them in the dark, behind closed doors, is not a solution.

If we handle them with care — and shine the spotlight on the problems instead of the people — our team has a real chance to grow and improve. That’s why it’s worth the effort.