How To Make The ‘Right’ Mistakes

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, the best startup show on planet Earth. Today's episode is about how to deal with mistakes in business. So let's hop right into it. I had an employee make a mistake with one of my businesses recently. It wasn't a big mistake, but it was the second or third mistake that they had made within a single week. And so I tried to be really intentional in how I responded to them and the mistake they had made. I wanted them to understand that the mistakes that they were making were below the standard of work that both I expected and I thought they were capable of. But I also didn't want to overreact in a manner that would make them want less likely to share mistakes in the future. And I thought a lot about how do I strike this balance of the employee feeling safe, but also them understanding the standard that was expected of them. Because there's this, um, old adage about running businesses where what you allow or what you accept to happen is the standard that you ultimately accept for your business. And so if you want a high standard, you should only be accepting things that meet that standard, if you accept things that fall below that standard, that is the new standard that you've set within your business. And so after I messaged this person trying to strike that balance I just described, I reflected more not just on this mistake, but how I think about mistakes more generally in business, because they will happen frequently and they will happen at all levels of the organization. Some mistakes will be insignificant. Other mistakes could actually be kind of like business crushing if they're high risk and large in scale. And in general, mistakes aren't a bad thing as long as they are the right type of mistakes, because the right type of mistakes are not about carelessness or lack of ability necessarily. They're actually a sign that you're pushing a company hard enough, or you as an employee or a leader are pushing yourself hard enough, where at times your abilities and your knowledge are simply less than what achieving a goal requires. And that's not a bad thing. It means that you have a growth mindset. All of this to say, when an employee makes the right type of mistakes, I'll never be upset. We're going to take a quick break, but more from Founders Journal when we get back. I have a very simple policy around mistakes that I hold myself and I hold anyone else I work with accountable to. I don't care about a mistake as long as an employee meets these 4 criteria. They take ownership of their mistake. Second, they have a plan for fixing their mistake. Third, they have an exceptional explanation if it's a repeat mistake, because generally repeat mistakes shouldn't happen if someone's learned from their first mistake. And fourth, they have put in clear consideration commensurate with the risk if the mistake has huge consequences. The translation for that is when you're doing something in work, when you're making a decision or you're trying to accomplish a goal, the stakes of that goal or the decision can range from really low where like if you make a mistake, it's not going to have a large impact on the business to really high where if you're wrong in this decision, let's say it's a huge hire or it's a big strategic decision. If you're wrong, it can actually set the company back years into the past. And so that fourth one is basically just saying, Have you put in the right amount of thought for the amount of risk that is related to the decision you made that ultimately led to the mistake? And I mentioned it before sharing this list, but I try to do my absolute best in calling out when I've made a mistake as well, because like everything else in business, what you model as a leader is what ultimately is copied by your team. And so just a quick example for you. I spent time prepping materials for our first employees onboarding at StoryYard, which is my ghostwriting agency, and I set the expectation with our CEO that the materials would be done the Thursday before our first employee started so that the CEO would have the time to organize everything together before the weekend so they didn't have to work on the weekend. Old Alex would have either found an excuse for why the materials weren't done in time or sent the materials late without acknowledging that I had missed the deadline, which is perfectly fine behavior if that is the exact behavior that I want my CEO or anyone else at the company to model back to me. But that's not the case. That is not the behavior that I want modeled. And so I didn't do what old Alex would have done. I ended up messaging our CEO saying, and this is an exact quote, sorry for delay on this. I said that I'd have this for you end of Thursday and I didn't. I hate improperly setting expectations. That's my bad. And I will get you the rest of the briefing docs ASAP. I wanted them to know that I made a mistake, that I acknowledged I improperly set expectations, and that I had a plan to get it done ASAP. This would've been even better if instead of ASAP I had an exact date, but live and learn. So next time you make a mistake or you witness a mistake within your business, think about the behavior that you are modeling for your team and if your team is doing the right things in the face of the inevitable mistakes that they will make. As always, thank you so much for listening. Shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com if you want to introduce yourself, if you want to say anything about the show, or if you have any episode ideas that you'd like me to cover in the future. And otherwise, I'll catch you next episode. Bye.