Make the Decision. Own the Mistake.

When you're responsible for other people, you can't avoid every wrong decision. You can make a decision with the information you have, explain why you made it, and correct it when you learn more. Indecision doesn't protect a team from mistakes; it leaves the team waiting for direction.

I learned a version of that lesson when I was 18. A manager named Frank promoted me at Walmart, and I found myself directing coworkers who had much more life experience than I did. Frank told me to be decisive. He didn't tell me I'd always be right. He told me that when I realized I'd made a bad call, I needed to come to him, explain my reasoning and let him help me make a better call next time.

Explain the decision, not just the result

If a decision goes badly, “I was wrong” is an important start. It isn't the whole conversation. I also want to know why I chose that course. What information did I have? What did I overlook? Was the problem in the facts, the judgment or the way I communicated the decision?

Frank's advice mattered because it made the mistake something we could learn from. If I could tell him what led me to the decision, he could offer guidance on the thinking behind it. Merely hiding the error—or admitting it without examining it—would leave me likely to repeat it.

I carried that into the way I work with a team. In the October 2021 discussion, I said that if I make a mistake, I need to say so. Then we can address what happened and ask how to avoid similar problems. I want team members to be able to bring their own mistakes to me with the same candor: here was the outcome I wanted, here is what happened, and here is what I think we should do now.

Fix this error, then look for its pattern

The immediate repair matters. If a customer, colleague or project is affected, we need to deal with the actual consequence. Afterward I want to ask a second set of questions. Could better communication have caught the problem sooner? Is there a process that would make this type of mistake less likely? Does the same flawed assumption appear somewhere else in our work?

That last step is easy to skip. Once a problem is fixed, the temptation is to move on. But if the cause remains in the system, the next mistake may look different on the surface while coming from the same source. A useful discussion of an error should improve the next decision, not merely close the current one.

This is also why honesty has to run in both directions. I can't demand that other people acknowledge a bad call while pretending my own decisions are beyond question. Admitting a mistake may be uncomfortable, but it gives the team a chance to solve the problem and improve how we work.

In my article on setting expectations early, the focus is on making responsibilities clear before the work begins. Here the focus is on what a leader does after a decision has been made and the result shows that something needs to change.

Make the call when a call is needed. If it turns out to be wrong, own it, explain how you arrived there, repair the damage and use what you learned to make the next decision better.