Small Mistakes. Big Impacts.
With great power, comes great responsibility.
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
I am starting this article with a story which has its anniversary around this time of year. Some summers ago, the Product Owner wrote an email sent to multiple stakeholders with a small typo. While writing about milestones, instead of “June”, he wrote “July”. A 30-day mistake triggered an escalation that reached the company’s C-level. The typo was related to a small development that was ready for at least half a year, and we were waiting for validation and sign-off from the client since. Finally, we started preparing the rollout and considering different constraints, it was scheduled for the beginning of June. While a stakeholder was confirming with the Product Owner about the delivery date, the reply was on the wrong part of summer.
Immediately after, my inbox was full of nonsense and wrong assessments from different stakeholders on every level inside the organization. The error was identified shortly, and an email was sent correcting the mistake, followed with multiple IM messages to different stakeholders. For some reason, some people didn’t read the follow-up email stating the mistake and the escalation kept on going. That day the Product Owner and I, have spent half of a day stating the same message over and over: It was a typo.
When stepping up to any leadership position, one thing becomes evident. A mistake in any management position as its consequence is multiplied by the level of responsibility and importance in the organization. During my software developer days, an error in my code would only trigger a defect on a bug tracker. As a Manager, confusion about the topic being discussed on ill preparation from my end can impact budget allocations and implementation strategies.
Mistakes will always happen. How to handle and mitigate those mistakes, is the key strategy.
Check and Balance
In positions of high responsibility and scope, is important to have controls set in place to avoid mistakes or at least, raise an alert if something is off. Some of these controls can be embedded in the way we organize our work.
One simple example while sending important emails, is to add relevant people in cc on those communications. The key word is “relevant”. Doesn’t matter which hierarchy that person has in the organization, but needs to be relevant to the topic being handled. It needs to be someone who is working actively on the subject and will read the email you are sending. If I need to communicate a deadline or milestone regarding a project to a higher hierarchy, I have no issue adding the developer doing the actual work on the email. If something is off, the developer will be racing to tell me, because is the person who is actively working on the subject. Other examples, is asking my manager for a 4-eyes-check on very sensitive emails and confirm our alignment.
That’s why is so important to review important milestones or information within the team before communicate them in a wider audience.
Another example is calendar post-its or alerts. I have several scheduled notes in my calendar to remind me to check a series of figures or perform some control tasks. The goal here is to avoid errors that might grow under the radar and develop into serious problems in the future. These alerts are related to reviewing budget consumption within a given period, relaunching person X or Y about a topic if I don’t get news avoiding forgetting about it, etc.
However, a great tool for preventing mistakes is checklists! I have another story regarding checklists. On a previous project, we had some highly bureaucratic processes, and it was a pain just to gather all the needed information. To address this level of complexity, I started to create documentation that centered around a checklist, so anyone could perform a highly bureaucratic process with significant help and error mitigation to prevent losing time. Unfortunately, my boss at the time said bluntly to me: “If someone needs a checklist is because they don’t know how to do their work”. Of course, I have ignored this godly message and finished the checklist nevertheless. That checklist helped us to deliver way more quality than other competitors, and with more quantity.
The main message here is to find strategies for controlling and checking whatever you are doing, to avoid or identify a mistake as soon as possible, and to apply a mitigation strategy with greater impact. If a mistake is made, ideally you will manage it before it gets out of hand.
Is not personal. It’s work.
One thing I see with new leaders is taking a mistake too severely and seeing it as a direct correlation to their ability to do the work. It helps the fact I am not a surgeon so I can tell myself that nobody will die based on my mistakes. Developing emotional intelligence and growing to analyze an error is key, for going around or simply correcting that mistake when it happens.
The bigger the responsibility, the bigger the impact of our errors. Is important to have a somehow stoic mentality in those situations.
Finding a fix can be simply addressing the topic on an email or a call. If a mistake resulted in a consequence of the size of Mount Everest, with an impact of millions of euros, probably the person who made the mistake was the unlucky one. Because the issue might be in the process and was a matter of time before such an error occurred. Processes should have systems and checks that should be made resilient to mistakes and even auto-correct or alert them.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur