The dreams of most leaders of small and even mid-sized organizations often go unrealized. Why? We all make mistakes. Almost daily.
Okay, daily. We’re human.
Some mistakes go unnoticed. So you take notes and hope not to repeat.
But what happens when you blow it and people do notice? Sometimes everyone knows you made a mistake but no one’s saying anything. Should you break the ice? And if so how?
Or what about those situations when people confront you or bring it up? How can you recover as a leader without losing face?
Believe it or not, there is a way you can handle it that, in most cases, will actually increase people’s respect for you.
You might even impress people with how you’ve handled it. Do it often enough when you’ve made a mistake, and you might even get a promotion.
Best yet, this approach to recovering after you’ve messed up is not just a work tip: it’s a life tip.
Practice it when you’ve let your spouse down, kids down, or friends down and your relationships will almost always get better.
Battle Your Instincts
The temptation you will have when you blow a situation will be to do what we all want to do:
- Hide it.
- Hope no one finds out.
- Minimize it.
- Blame someone.
- Justify it.
Battle all five instincts every time. If you can do this, you’re on your way to overcoming the problem that sinks most people when it comes to owning mistakes.
But you need to replace those defaults with specific actions.
7 Ways to Recover as a Leader
As you battle those instincts, replace them with these 7 actions and you’ll find yourself in a very different situation.
Your boss, spouse, friend or team member will probably respect you more and even trust you more if you do these 7 things.
1. Be the first to break the news
Remember, you’re going to want to hide your mistake. Cover it up.
And yet most leaders—especially bosses— hate surprises. I do. So don’t let them discover your mistake. Tell them first. Break the news.
As soon as you detect even the potential of a problem, let your leader know.
Instead of reducing your boss’s confidence in your leadership, it will increase it.
Send the text. Make the phone call. Stop by the office. Look your boss in the eye. Tell them.
2. Fully state the seriousness of the problem
Here’s what I know to be true. Things are almost always worse than you first think they are. So don’t minimize a problem or blow it off. Fully state the seriousness of the problem. If you’re going to lean toward overstating or understating a problem, overstate it.
Why should you overstate it?
Think through a time when someone’s let you down and understated the problem. If you’ve had a team member tell you something is ‘no big deal’ only for you to discover it’s a bigger deal than they told you, what happens to you inside? I know I feel like saying, “Do you realize how serious this is? Do you even understand the issue?” And your confidence in them drops.
I am always thankful when something doesn’t turn out to be as serious as people initially thought it might be. I’ll bet you feel the same way.
So fully state the seriousness of an issue. Even overstate it if you’re not sure.
3. Own the problem completely, even if you didn’t directly cause it
Great leaders own problems. Even the problems they didn’t directly cause.
Here’s how I think of my own leadership: If I’m the leader, I’m responsible.
This is difficult, because often I didn’t directly cause the problem. I wasn’t in the room, at the meeting or even at the event. But if I’m the leader, it’s still my responsibility when things go wrong.
By owning up to your responsibility, you demonstrate a brand of leadership that is far too rare.
If you’re the leader, you’re responsible. Click To Tweet4. Offer the most complete diagnosis you can
Part of owning an issue is demonstrating you are doing everything in your power to diagnosis and remedy the situation.
Rarely will you have all the information you need to make a full diagnosis when a problem emerges, but bring everything you have to the table every time. Again, this will increase your boss’s confidence in the fact that you are on it.
Again, if your boss knows you were the first to come forward, you understand the problem, you’re owning it and you’re working on it, his or her confidence in you rises, even though you’ve made a mistake.
5. Get input
Because you’re still struggling to some extent with shame or fear, you’ll be tempted to think, “well since I’m responsible, I have to fix this.” It’s like when you knocked that vase off the living room end table when you were 8 and tried to glue it back together so your parents would never know. Those instincts never really go away.
But sometimes you can’t fix what broke on your own. In fact, usually you can’t.
So get help. Be open. Ask for input.
An open leader is a great leader. Great leaders know they have blind spots. So get input from the team around you (and your boss) on what the issue might be.
You’ll get a better diagnosis, a better solution and a better team as a result.
An open leader is a great leader. Get input. It takes away your blind spots. Click To Tweet6. Follow up quickly and often, until it’s fully resolved
Don’t make your boss or team members keep asking you whether you’re on it. Give them updates.
Give daily updates if it’s serious. Hourly if necessary. Just remind them you’re on it.
7. Fix the system, not just the problem
Once the problem has been resolved, go the extra mile and ask yourself, “was this really a completely unpreventable problem, or is this a systems issue?”
Chances are something in your current system produced the result. As you know, your system is perfectly designed to get the results it’s currently getting, good or bad.
Go back to your boss or team and now work on the larger issue of how to handle the systems issues that will help ensure problems like this won’t happen again.
After you've made a mistake, fix the system, not just the problem. Click To TweetI know this is all counterintuitive, but every time I’ve seen someone follow this process for handling a mistake, I am impressed. My confidence in them grows. It doesn’t diminish. I often want to promote them or at least give them greater responsibility.
And if you adopt this approach, it will not just help you solve an issue, it will make you a better leader.
It will also make you a better spouse, parent, friend and citizen.
