When leaders make mistakes

I remember the day I made the mistake. The drop of my stomach when I realized it. The embarrassment.

It wasn’t long into my leadership role. I’d made mistakes before — plenty of them. While I’d made bigger ones, this mistake felt different. It stung more. I felt more deflated. Disappointed in myself. Normally transparent, there was a split second where I wanted to hide from the mistake. That felt even worse. As a recovering perfectionist, I’d done a bunch of work to be easier on myself, especially when it came to making mistakes. I was alarmed by my reaction.

Later I recognized other leaders also had disproportionate reactions to some of their mistakes. It came up over and over again with my clients. Realizing that other leaders had a similar experience made me feel less alone. I learned that the further you step into leadership, the more the expectations grow; the pressure grows too. Expectations come from others, and from yourself.

We all make mistakes. It's just more complicated when leaders make them. Their position of power and our expectations of them play a part. The stakes feel higher. Those mistakes also often have a disproportionate impact on others, making it even more stressful. Psychology plays a role too.

What happens after we make a mistake

Photo by Francisco Gonzalez on Unsplash

Embarrassment often accompanies mistakes. Guilt, regret and shame can set in. Under these swirling emotions, we often take two divergent paths. To get out of the grasp of those feelings, we avoid acknowledging the mistake or, we go in the opposite direction bearing too much of the brunt of the responsibility for the mistake.

Avoidance after a mistake is human nature. Examples of leaders side step acknowledging their mistakes abound. If you look at a site or newspaper today it probably wouldn’t take long to find one. It’s easy to be angry at obvious mistakes that get covered up rather than dealt with upfront.

It’s hard to sympathize with the behavior. And yet, the impulse isn’t unusual. When you make a mistake it’s natural to want to cover it up or fix it before anyone notices. It’s just human nature. You aren’t bad for having that instinct, it’s just not necessarily helpful.

When we avoid addressing our mistake directly, the guilt only grows. It makes everything harder. An unacknowledged mistake sends the unintended message that the team doesn't matter or that the leader thinks they're perfect. This breaks trust. Even though it's hard, coming clean is best for the team's well-being and our own.

Being overly responsible for a mistake and everything that comes after is just as bad. Let's say you gave overly harsh feedback. The person reacted poorly to the feedback. Your mistake becomes obvious. You feel bad, mired in guilt. You don’t want to hurt them again, you reckon they don’t deserve it. So, you reel back and say less. You become nicer, skipping the hardest conversations. They get less growth oriented feedback. Their development stagnates, their performance suffers. Even if the person’s performance isn’t affected, the relationship still suffers. It’s hard to have an effective relationship when we’re constantly dancing around a submerged issue. You lose the ability to be direct, a devastating loss for any career development relationship.

While our perception might be that leaders avoid taking responsibility for their mistakes, I see just as many become overly responsible. It's just as damaging. An avoidant person might be more likely to blame or be hard on others while the overly responsible person is more likely to blame and be hard on themselves. Both reactions have a negative impact.

THE AFTERMATH

Photo by Pawel Janiak on Unsplash

While they lie just beneath the surface, the influence of submerged and unresolved emotions from past mistakes is felt everywhere. They change our interactions with others; first in subtle ways, later in more dramatic ways. If left to simmer too long they begin to take over our thought processes, having an undue influence on the decisions we make. If we avoid, we become more hardened in trying to be right. If overly responsible, we make decisions that aren’t actually the best ones for the person, or the team. The tricky part is that we don’t even realize these emotions have taken over.

We have to acknowledge the mistake to ourselves, and those impacted. In order to be effective it has to be genuine. You can’t hide behind a nice veneer, you actually have to feel the pain of your error. Once you’ve acknowledged to the person(s) affected, take time to process it. Wring out all the learning. Talk with your coach about it. Journal about the situation. Have a debrief with a trusted colleague. If you don’t take the mental space to do negative thoughts will lurk in the background.

A few signs you might have some unresolved emotions about a mistake:

• Do you find yourself pulling away someone?

• Do you dread conversations with them?

• Do you feel uncomfortable around someone?

• Are you more indecisive when it comes to delivering them feedback?

• Does decision making in general feel harder?

If you can answer yes to any of these, there’s a good chance lingering emotions have taken over.

Pay attention to your reactions, they can threaten relationships if not addressed. Don’t look just for tears. Loads of people don’t cry. There are plenty of other ways it can show up like anger, uncertainty, doubt or a feeling of resignation. Pay attention — they’re not just pesky emotions, they’re guideposts pointing you where to look.

Clean up the mess

Be on the lookout for bouts of perfectionism. This weight can feel heaviest when taking on a new leadership role. You want to prove that you’re ready to take on new responsibility, you might fear making mistakes. Perfectionism can set in. When people’s careers and well-being are at stake, this sneaky behavior can rise up, even when we think we’ve vanquished it. Fight the lure of perfectionism. It can lead you to overworking yourself, doubting yourself and even to being too cautious.

During my coach training our instructor told us we'd make mistakes, to accept it as a reality. The key was to stay in conversation so you can clean up the mess. That cleaning up the mess was way more important than the mistake we made. This is not a small thing.

Coaching can often involve emotions for the person you’re coaching. You feel the weight of responsibility to do right by them. You never want to screw up. It makes you aim for perfection which of course is an impossible thing to promise yourself when you’re learning a new skill. To learn something new you have to practice which means you’ll get it wrong far more often than you’ll get it right, especially in the beginning.

Learning how to stay engaged when I made a mistake that had a potential impact on someone’s emotional or mental well-being was one of the best skills I’ve ever learned.

Cleaning up my own mess

After six months of coach training and a year-long certification course, all that was left was an eight hour in-person exam. The morning consisted of an written exam, the afternoon was live coaching two people: one of the examiners and one of your fellow participants.

An hour into the written exam I accidentally knocked my tea all over the paper of one my fellow participants. I mopped it up as best I could but it ruined a couple of sections; she’d have to do them over. I felt horrible. I worried my long-held goal of being a certified coach would slip away from my grasp, just like my cup of tea.

Feeling guilty or being hard on myself was a luxury I couldn’t afford. There were still seven hours of exam left. The trickiest part? I was scheduled to coach her later that afternoon.

Given my mistake, the examiners asked if we wanted to switch so I didn’t have to coach the person whose exam I had ruined. She said she was ok if I was. I decided to go ahead. Over lunch we talked through what she needed from me in order to complete the exam. She told me she was fine, that she was clumsy too. She urged me to move on. I decided to stop being hard on myself about it and let it go. As a recovering perfectionist this was akin to scaling a 26,000 foot peak — without oxygen.

Trusting the mistake was resolved, I walked into that session ready to give her the best coaching experience I could. At the end of the day the examiners told me they had worried that this might derail both of our exams. That we both might fail and have to take it all over again. My mistake could impact both of our futures.

A few weeks later I learned that I had passed the exam. She passed too.

Whew.

you will make mistakes

That challenging situation taught me I could trust myself, even when the stakes were sky high. It was fantastic training for leadership.

A leader’s words, actions and decisions can have a tremendous impact on the well-being of others. It shows up in various ways from feedback, to a policy that impact someone’s daily work, salary decisions and much more. This pressure multiplies when more people are impacted, especially when at the organizational level.

It’s easy to worry or let even a small misstep get to you. Resist the temptation.

When you lead people you will make mistakes. It’s just part of the role. When you do, recognize negative feelings like regret, guilt, shame and let them go. Once you do, you'll be much more equipped to clean up the mess effectively.

You’re going to make mistakes. It's normal. Just stick around to clean up the mess.