How many chances are enough?
Everyone makes mistakes, but how many mistakes can you accept before it’s too much?
If you liked reading this, please click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Thanks!
Everyone makes mistakes! Especially when the pressure is intense, the stakes are high and there is a lot of competition. The question is not whether we will make mistakes, it is whether we will have enough success to outweigh all the mistakes we will make.
As a leader you get used to having your team make mistakes. In fact, one of the most important leadership skills you can learn is when to allow your team to make mistakes! You might know the correct course of action, but some things can only be learned through experience and mistakes are the best teachers. Knowing when to allow mistakes, and how to ensure they don’t become costly, comes from experience.
If mistakes are so common, and often necessary, there is an obvious question that emerges: how many mistakes is too many?
Imagine you hire someone new. All new employees make mistakes at first, but this new hire seems to be making more than you would expect. You start to ask some hard questions:
Is there something wrong with our onboarding?
Is the job too difficult?
Is the employee wrong for the job?
These are all good questions! It could be any of those, and knowing the difference is a critical part of your employee evaluation process. But before you tackle them, you need to think hard about how many mistakes you would expect. Where does that expectation come from?
Often, we compare the performance of someone on our team to how we would do the same job. That is largely unfair, since it’s unlikely anyone else would do the job in the same way or that we would want them to. If you are the best person for every role at your business, there is something very wrong. You can’t have unreasonable expectations of performance.
At the same time, we are often too forgiving of mistakes. If an employee is making mistakes, your instinct might be to help them and compensate for their weaknesses. That can help if you do it a little, but any more than a little does a disservice to your entire team. You hire your team to do their jobs, you shouldn’t have to do it for them.
Balancing your high expectations with your instinct to help is hard, but finding that balance is critical. If you find that balance, you can effectively evaluate the mistakes your team is making and understand if they are growing pains or systemic problems that need to be fixed.
Without that balance, you might second guess yourself and wonder if you are helping them too much or holding them to too high of a standard. That lack of confidence will waste time and energy.
If you have balance and confidence, if you start wondering about an employee’s mistakes then it is likely a problem. Instead of second guessing yourself, you can make a change and save time.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter why that new hire was making more mistakes than you would expect. Whether the mistakes are their fault or not, you can’t have someone making too many mistakes in a given role. Your business might not be able to survive it!
So the question is whether you have the right balance to decide how many mistakes are enough. When you do, it should be easier to fix those mistakes.
For more on Performance Management, see: