Is It Time to Hit The Reset Button?

A question was raised by one participant in the afternoon session when we had a syndicate discussion of the leadership and management coaching program. The question was about the role of a leader in tackling mistakes and crisis handling. She also said that in most training classes and workshops that she had attended, a lot of presentation materials and examples about how to be a successful leader, about motivating employees, goal-setting, empowerment,  were discussed but not so much on what to do when something goes wrong. So,when we have failure which sometime will eventually happen, what should we do?

Failures and mistakes in the workplace that were part of the common business process or of the problem-solving process are actually the consequences of inadequate skills of the workers and/or lack of control by those in charge. Many mistakes in the workplace are often associated with negligence. People make mistakes because it's the nature of being human. Certainly the mistakes caused by carelessness should be treated differently than those that occur as the team tries to try new things. But how do we recognize and hence set a system to avoid the same bad decision from occuring in the future that might cause similar or more serious mistakes and failures? Do we just hit the reset button and then move on?

Learning from other people and our own mistakes and/or experience, needs a consistent approach that can be integrated into the operational management system. In the company that I worked for in the mid nineties until 2004, these are steps that were successfully applied in handling failures and mistakes caused by bad management decision and  I think still can be used as guidelines:

1. Call a meeting for sharing the lessons-learned. We might want to name it just a regular review meeting but make sure that we have it.
2. Share with the team the facts and what has been learned.
3. Always create an environment that encourages the team involved and for other employees to have an understanding of what had happened and to have a real deep learning.
4. Please make sure that the learning process is not just a one-time activity. The learning process should be on an ongoing basis.

It is a tendency in many companies to formalize the learning process into a project based activity. Although a formal learning process should be encouraged, it will be important to keep the process of learning  simple and participated by as many employees as possible.

There was no single reason why a bad management decision is not disclosed.  In addition, many other factors must be cited as possible reasons for failures in the brainstorming session as it is very seldom failures and/or mistakes caused only by a single reason.

Winston Churchill was once said that all men make mistakes, but only wise men learn from their mistakes. Whatever the reasons, get rid of wrong failed initiatives is very important and don’t hesitate to hit that reset button when it is deemed necessary.