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Transcript
Hey everyone, in this episode I want to talk about how we can sometimes make our employees focus on avoidance instead of excellence.
A lot of that depends on the culture we create, the environments we create where people work. When we go around and we’re about finding people doing wrong and we’re kind of the compliance mentality that let me make sure my people are following the rules, let me make sure they’re doing things right, let me catch them doing mistakes, then you’re creating kind of a culture of fear, and people are going to be afraid to make mistakes.
They’re going to be afraid to share mistakes, they’re going to be afraid to share problems or issues. They’re likely to be afraid to take risks because risks create mistakes.
When you’re innovating, when you’re pursuing ideas, mistakes are going to happen. When you’re learning, mistakes are going to happen. If you’re about trying to catch people making mistakes and getting them for it or punishing them for it, then people aren’t going to try as much. They’re going to do what’s easy, they’re not going to take the risks.
And not only that, is when that happens, when people are focused more on trying to not make a mistake, their focus is on avoidance. Their focus is not making a mistake, not pursuing excellence.
When you have a compliance mentality that people have to do a process or even, like, doing a process a certain way, people sometimes start focusing on the process versus doing the outcome well.
So question really is, are your people pursuing excellence? Do they feel safe to pursue excellence or are they focused on not making a mistake? Because those two don’t go well together.
Because if they’re focused on not making a mistake, that’s all they’re caring about, not pursuing excellence. Excellence sometimes brings mistakes. And you have to be willing and okay for mistakes to happen.
I like what Ray Dalio said in his book Principles. He said, you want a culture where mistakes are okay, but learning from them is not.
Mistakes should be fine. You should be okay with mistakes. You should be supporting people. You should want people to speak up and say, “Hey, yo, I made a mistake,” because you want to help people with them. You want to help them learn from it and move forward and keep going forward.
When people are focused on compliance and making sure they don’t make a mistake, then people aren’t going to try. They’re not gonna do the excellent stuff. Or even if it’s the focus is so much on a process and they’re gonna be inspected to make sure they do a process exactly the way a certain way. The focus then becomes on the process versus excellence, versus the outcome.
And sometimes we can focus so much on the process that the outcome doesn’t really seem to matter to us anymore because that’s all we care about is the process because that’s what we’re concerned about or that’s what leadership management is concerned about. Make sure you do the process right, then we’re not focused on the outcome anymore.
Couple things to think about, make sure when it comes to the environment you create that people feel safe and that they’re focused on excellence and not just avoiding mistakes. Hope this helps.
