Effective Leadership: What if your team makes a mistake?

Take a breath and don't hit the panic button in front of your clients when you think one of your team members may have made a mistake.

At a recent debrief, I almost had a freak-attack! Notice, I said almost.

Here is what happened during a recent debrief - one of the project managers spoke aloud wondering if my coordination review had caught a particular issue that they learned about after sending me the drawings. Oh boy! I started to sweat! Did we catch that particular coordination error? I hope so, I hope so, I hope so!

Let me explain a little about how we do reviews… one person doesn’t review a whole project. It would just take too long and said person could quite likely go insane. So, we create a team of reviewers to take care of a specific area or discipline and the team lead looks over the final reviewed documents and debriefs the project, if a debrief is desired by the client. But the team lead hasn’t memorized every discrepancy… and uses the marked-up drawings to refresh their memories during the debrief.

So, at that moment, I had absolutely no idea if we had caught the coordination discrepancy or not!

It turned out that my teammate had found the discrepancy… much to my relief. But what if they didn't?

Of course, even if we did miss something, it’s not the end of the world even if it is embarrassing. After all, reviewers are human beings too, and can make mistakes. (So we like to make our comments soft and sweet, because we might have to eat them later on!)

It’s not a problem that mistakes are made, mistakes will always be made, but the focus should be on attempting to prevent them in the future. Ideally, the same mistake is never repeated twice and if the proper quality measures and routines are put into place, reoccurring mistakes should be minimal.

So basically, take a breath, get over it and move on!

Author: Natalie Nigro, President