Leadership Style: When one of your team members make a mistake

OK, this one was me, I did it. And I should have known better, I do know better, I am an editor and an educated writer, and I screwed up.

Recently we mailed out our first newsletter, hard print by snail mail, and I typed in this blog address incorrectly, and I didn't catch the error and nobody else did either.

So what do you do when one of your team members makes a mistake? And it is a good one.

Of course, I was just stunned, I couldn't believe I did that. But there it was bright as day. My client was standing behind me when I realized and she realized my error. Of course I apologized, then we moved on to laughing about it, too late now right? And I am sure she won't let me forget it and tease me about it for as long as it's funny.

After this incident we talked about this topic. What is the best way to deal with a team member that makes a mistake? Here are some ideas we came up with:

• Accept it. Everyone makes mistakes. However, you may want to reconsider the relationship if they make the kind of mistakes you can't live with.
• Choose progressive thinking team members. No mistake should occur twice, choose team members that are capable of improving themselves and are conscious of their importance on the team.
• Work with people you can trust. Good team members try to do a good job and if they make a mistake you know that they didn't do it on purpose or because they do not care.
• Find solutions. If it is the kind of error that you think could happen again, put your heads together and figure out the best way to prevent the same kind of problem in the future.
• Don't freak out. If you overreact you may foster a situation where your team members will be nervous about fessing up or they will be afraid of you. If this happens and they are anxious all day - nothing gets done. On the other hand, if you anger yourself you are also impeding your own production.

Our solution: For now on we are going to check all web and email addresses, even if we think it is right. Better safe than sorry.

Author: Pamela S. Stevens

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