Have you ever been overly severely chastised? So severely reprimanded that not only you felt guilty (because you felt you had done something badly), but also, and worse, you felt shamed (because you felt you were a bad person for having done something badly). No one likes heavy-handed reactions to their mistakes in life, even well-deserved ones. So, if you would much prefer your people feeling empowered rather than ashamed, then you must consider this.
The fault in these situations is almost never yours, but rather it is almost always the person’s chastising you incorrectly, by failing to separate you the doer from “it” the deed; by failing to hate your error, but love you as a errant one; and by refusing to first consider whether it wasn’t you who failed, but rather it was a poorly-designed or absent procedure that was the root cause of the error.
The proper way to respond to bad outcomes is to investigate what happened and improve the quality of the policies, procedures, and work instructions being used to be sure the bad outcome becomes much less likely to repeat itself.
A pair of Hopkins double D’s (M.D, Ph.D.’s), Drs. Pronovost and Bienvenu recently published an opinion column discussing this issue in the Journal of the American Medical Association (12/15/2015 at 2507 and, yes, I have continued to read JAMA and other medical journals long after I quit medical school after only two years in 1983). The doctors bemoaned the distress medical students and residents felt after being wrongly dressed down by their superiors with comments such as, “You will never make it as a doctor” or “You are worthless” and strongly encouraged both teaching and learning doctors to separate themselves and others from their respective errors and omissions and channel their efforts toward diagnosing what went procedurally wrong in order to improve the quality in their systems.
Shaming people for their honest mistakes is destructive, imposes needless suffering on the misfeasor, usually increases the risk of more misfeasance, and limits learning and growing from our adverse experiences. It makes people feel diminished and humiliated and causes them to withdraw from those around them. Making someone feel guilty about doing something badly is only marginally better.
Reacting in an accepting manner,however, with concern about how the erring person feels and with positive, constructive curiosity about how the mistake occurred and how quality of the policy, procedure, and work instructions used can be enhanced to lessen the likelihood of the mistake happening again helps everyone and everything involved in the experience.
Susan and I simultaneously live and work in at least three workspaces – business, law, and medicine. While in our own individual workspaces we seek to live by Ken Besser’s definition of experience (breaking things, having to fix them, and fixing the process that caused them), we seldom see many others approaching errors the way we do, i.e., opportunities to learn how to improve the quality of our systems. Regrettably, we often see to the contrary superiors taking a judgmental attitude and speaking in shame-inducing and guilt-inducing language.
Inducing shame and guilt does absolutely nothing but reduce the likelihood that the erring person will ever admit and learn from a mistake again. Loving people admitting their mistakes with unconditional acceptance, however, removes almost all adverse consequences of the admission and increases the probability that erring person and all others who might err in the future and have heard they will be appropriately rewarded for admitting will come forward earlier and more often than someone suffering guilt and shame at the mouths of their superiors.
Most errors are caused by poor quality systems, poor quality technology, unrealistic quotas, inadequate support systems. When errors occurred and are hopefully self-reported, the best response is to first assume the erring person lacked any intent to cause harm, respect the person for coming forward, seek to understand what they did and why they did it, engage in shared responsibility, and work together to improve the quality of all the systems that were involved in the mistake.
Such a response is the essence of love, which is greater than guilt, which is greater than shame. Love is the essence of Greatness!
[reminder]When was the last time you made a mistake and admitted it to a superior?[/reminder]
In the meantime, you GOTTABGATT!, so go out there today and be Great! All the time!