As a business leader, I found that one of the scariest
things to do was to give your people the freedom to make mistakes. While
mistakes allow individuals to learn and grow, they can also be very costly to
any company. Scared as I was, I knew that truly great leaders found ways to
allow their people to take these risks, and I genuinely wanted to be a great
leader. I wanted to help my employees to grow. So I set out to discover how to
accomplish this without placing my company in jeopardy.
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment
that something else is more important than fear.” - Meg Cabot
I quickly discovered that the first step was to determine
the areas of the business where a mistake could take place without causing too
much damage. I took careful attention to make sure that any areas where we
would damage our clients and the trust they had placed in us were off limits
for significant risk without serious executive involvement and oversight. I
identified other areas where I could feel more comfortable allowing people the
freedom to experiment on new and better ways of doing things.
The second step was to communicate to the employees that we
were setting an official company policy:
Making any mistake once was OK, so long as it was an honest mistake made
while attempting to do what they felt was the right thing. Making any mistake
once was OK, but repeating that same mistake a second time was NOT OK. The
hard, fast rule was that if you made any mistake for the first time the entire
team would have your back in fixing that mistake if anything went wrong.
