Managing Errors In Business?

Mistakes Happen, Just Do Not Encourage Them!

I like watching professional sports, sometimes.  I get a little bored with some of the player and owner antics that come along with the professional sports world within its integrated money issues.  I can, however, live with the spirit of great athleticism.  I am often amazed at the effort and ability of so many players.  I enjoy watching how certain players seem to come up with fabulous play.  It is exciting to watch.

Some of you know that my youth to college life was dominated by a lot of baseball.  I ate, drank and slept a lot of baseball in my life.  My time chips centered around that sport.  One of the things I have grown to appreciate about that sport is how one inning a player can become a real goat by making a terrible mistake.  Then three innings later that same player may become the hero for doing something extraordinary that caused the team to win.  It is a sport that offers so many mistakes a second chance.  It is funny how one player can become the hero when earlier that same player was on the everyone-condemnation list.  I have worn those shoes.  I have felt terribly small for the mistake I made in an earlier inning and later in that same game, steal a base that caused a wild throw to score the guy ahead of me, which eventually proved to be the winning run.  Stuff like that happens.  The professionals know this truth very well.  They have seen it over and over in their career.  A mistake is not the end of the world.

How do you manage the errors you make in the business you own?  Do you try to cover it up and hide it away from the others to see?  Do you sweep it under the rug?  Do you allow it to take you down?  Do you ignore the mistake and make it again?  How do you manage the errors you make in your business?  Listen, we all make mistakes.  Nobody comes to the dinner table perfectly designed.  All have fallen short, according to the 'real' book of life.  I like the word "all."  That does not usually mean sometimes, somebody.  It means, everyone.  There are no players that can escape this truth.  "All" have fallen short.  "All" have made some errors.

I created a big mistake yesterday.  It was very aggravating.  I am one of those people who is a high-need achiever.  Errors do not fit well in my world of play.  I am my own worst critic.  So when I make a big mistake, I am typically pretty hard on myself.  I wage war on the mistakes I make.  I hate them.  I had a nurse tell me the other day, "You do not need to be perfect."  She was referring to my diabetes eating habits.  I had a scheduled follow up with her the other day on my benchmark routine work to see how I am managing my type 2 diabetes.  My wife and I have taken this work very seriously.  We have been able to manage our diet in such a good way that my sugar counts have been managed low enough to remove the need for taking any more medicine.  We have been able to successfully manage my type 2 diabetes with an improved diet and exercise routine.  During the examination, the dietary nurse told us that we did not need to be perfect in our efforts.  Her comment might have something to do with the spreadsheet of our recorded vitals we turned in to her, reflecting how we track morning, noon and night all of our diet activities.  She may have noticed our efforts of over-kill.

When they diagnosed my diabetes, I asked enough questions to wear the poor doctor out.  I told him to get this challenge under control right now and get me started on the medicine.  At the same time, I asked the doctor what I had to do to get off of that medicine.  He spelled out the plan and defined where my vital marks must remain in order to remove the medicine.  Those marks and that plan became my goal.  I wanted to remove the need for medicine to manage my diabetes challenge.  I shared that plan with my wife and off we went.  We reached those marks and have removed the use of medicine.  This is a good example of how my wife and I work.  We hate mistakes and mismanaging our eating habits had to be corrected.  That is likely why the dietary nurse made the comment she made.  She likely witnessed our intensity to meet our goals.  That is likely why she said, "You do not need to be perfect."

In life, nobody is perfect.  Never.  We error all of the time.  It is not usually the error that takes a small business down.  It is the repeated series of errors that usually do the trick.  Small business models usually fail because the owners do not manage their errors very well.  They either lose control when errors are made or they do not eliminate the repeated ones that hurt the most.  To error is human.  To mismanage the human errors is a troubling pattern to follow.  I will likely be able to refrain from making the mistake I made yesterday because I recognize exactly how I made that error happen.  I will correct the wrong steps I made that led to that error.  Make sure you perform your leadership in this type of fashion.  You do not need to hide your error.  Expose it, address why it happened and determine what you will do to refrain from making that same one again.  That is how you manage errors in your business model.

This is easier to do when you are making the errors.  It is altogether a more difficult thing to manage when your staff or employees are producing costly errors.  Now you discover the approach has a whole different kind of tune.  Your reaction to someone else and their costly error becomes a new set of leadership challenges.  It does not look exactly the same to an owner as it does to the employee.  One has to pay for the error, the other usually does not.  Errors look altogether different to the person who has their wallet on the table.  The person who has to pay for the error has a slightly different perspective developed on how to take errors less serious.  The sting of the cost may distort how they view the error.

One Moment You Can Be The Goat, The Next Moment, A Hero!

One of the great leaders I worked with in the past had an interesting approach to business errors.  He truly felt an error was never about a person.  He never wanted to know who committed the error.  All he cared about was to be able to make sure his business model could function in its future well enough to protect against that error ever occurring again.  He never cared about who made the error.  It was always about how do we permanently fix the potential for that error to occur.  He only wanted to manage errors once in the cycle of how his model processed its business affairs.  He felt one error of that nature was enough.  He corrected immediately how that error was produced.  It was never about the person.  It was always about the system.

If an installer had made an error with an installation he performed, the owner would immediate look to see if that installer had the proper and adequate tools to do the job correctly.  If he noticed how a better tool could have avoided that error, he immediately purchased that tool and trained the employee how to use it properly.  Not only that, he made sure the newly purchased tool was the best his money could afford.  Every installer recognized how much help this owner offered to make sure they could perform their work in a better way.  It was very clear that he never measured the person and their ability.  He always measured the tools and systems they used.  He was a master at correcting the tools and system of flow.  He wanted all of his staff members to be able to perform their work in the best ways possible.  That was his goal.

This same owner said how much he noticed other business leaders and how they criticize their employees.  He would share how he never saw much good in that process.  He described how so many business leaders will subconsciously place an employees "F's" on the refrigerator for display.  He would describe how he witnessed so many leaders do this silly stuff.  He also shared how he has never met anyone who would actually place their children's report card on the refrigerator if it had an "F" on one of its pages.  Yet, those same people had no problem doing just the opposite with an employee who made a serious error at work.  He used to describe how silly this practice has become.  He learned how to improve the management of the errors his staff would perform.  He felt his kind of approach produced a much better set of favorable outcomes in the long run.

Treating errors with proper perspective is how a goat in the earlier innings can become the hero later in the game.  Errors are part of the business life.  They are part of the game.  The way you manage errors is a vital part of how successful your business model will become.  When errors occur, they are there for a reason.  Something is not working well.  It is your job as a leader to go figure out how you can better design the system you use to employ the people you hire to do the stuff you need done.  If they are not given the proper environment, time, tools, training, atmosphere and business model to operate cleanly, you have some more work to do.  Managing errors in your business is a vital part of how well your model performs.  You are the key leader who governs how many errors your model survives.  When you get out of the blame game and begin to work on the fix it game, your model will become more error-free.  Error-free is cheaper to operate.  It helps your bottom line.

Make sure you recognize how the errors occur.  Take a look first at the tools, the system, the time and the training.  If any of those components are slightly deficient, fix them immediately.  Your future will improve when your model improves.  Your model improves when your error management improves.  There is a direct correlation between these things.  Do your leadership job well and the amount of errors you need to endure will become less frequent to manage.  Your business checkbook will like what it supports when the right kind of stuff hits the right kind of hands in the right kind of ways.

She was right, you do not need to be perfect...just better.

Until next time...