Leadership Style: Humans are imperfect, even us

The other day, Natalie and I were going over our web pages making changes and discovered that we had missed making one of our logos an active link to the index page. This was surprising because that was something that was obvious and we had clearly missed it! At that moment, I once again realized what a huge undertaking it must be to design and produce plans for a commercial building. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be to work on an elementary school, office building, hospital, a huge prestigious resort, not to mention a stadium that would cost in excess of a billion dollars.

Over the past weeks, working on our own web sites and blog, we have made errors. Yes, we were inconsistent and left things out that we needed.

Not surprisingly, I have concluded that we are not perfect. When I say we, I mean we humans. Although, we may try to be correct, meticulous or stay focused, we still make mistakes. So when you make a mistake (and you will) who has your back?

When we at the Nigro Firm poke fun at the errors made on construction documents, we are not poking fun at any single architect or at architects in general, but are embracing and enjoying our shared imperfect humanness.

And if I know one thing, it is that imperfect humans need other imperfect humans to survive and prosper in life and at work, to watch each others backs and to catch each other when we fall.

How you go about surviving your imperfectness is up to you, but we like to take the happiest route possible...which is together.

Author: Shirley Nigro

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