Pop's Garage: Mistakes Are Good ... Sometimes

No one likes making mistakes. But managers make a mistake if they don't see staff mistakes as an opportunity, not a problem.

There are two broad types of mistakes, those made out of ignorance and those made for any other reason (laziness, lack of attention, attitude, whatever). The second type of mistake is bad, the first type isn't. Below I talk about the "good" mistakes, those out of ignorance.

The holy grail of training is learning from experience, to learn by doing. All good, but what is left out is that "learn by experience" actually means "learn from making mistakes." Okay, not always--it is very important that we learn from our successes (which we don't do often enough, a point continued later). But the truth is that most of the time we learn how to do something correctly by first doing it wrong. By making a mistake.

The rule I live by is, The First Mistake Is Free. No one should get in trouble for a mistake made out of ignorance. In fact managers should treat such "first" mistakes by staff as a positive. Why? Simple: because now the manager knows exactly what staff need to learn.

A huge part of a training budget is wasted in two (only?) ways: by training people who already know the stuff, and by training people in skills they don't need to do their job. One of the most critical jobs for managers, HR and trainers is to identify who needs what training.

Looking at mistakes made is perhaps the clearest way to answer the "who needs what training" question. If John makes a mistake then John's manager knows what training John needs. Making this even better is that the manager now knows that John can do the task. Nothing is better than certainty, or more elusive.

(When I led business process improvement/reengineering projects one of the first things I did was to survey staff and customers to find out where the mistakes were: the survey results were always my starting point.)

To complete the circle, treating mistakes as a negative, getting angry and/or punishing staff for "first mistakes," is one of the worst things managers can do. Staff will not only try to hide their mistakes--which always leads to a bad result--they will stop trying new things, stop showing initiative. The latter is death to staff development.

It is not always easy to smile when staff make a critical "first mistake." Yet smile a manager must, saving the grimace, foul language and physical reaction (punching a wall was my favorite) for when no one else is around.

Once again I retrun to the principle that training staff and developing staff into managers requires the ability to accept the inevitable mistakes as a necessary part of the process. Doing otherwise is a true mistake.