March 11, 2010
The Levels in Action
The Case for Making Forgiveness a Corporate Value
One of the silliest things I’ve found in the workplace is the tendency to speak as though human beings were perfectible. You see it in phrases like “flawless execution” and “the relentless pursuit of perfection,” which are problematic as aspirations and toxic if transformed into expectations. We all make mistakes, especially when we’re trying new things or pursuing ambitious goals.The way organizations respond to mistakes says a lot about the overall health of their culture.
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In the OCI Circumplex, a tool for assess-ing organizational culture, perfectionism is an aggressive-defensive style. Perfectionists are described as people who "need to attain flawless results, avoid failure, and equate self-worth with the attainment of unreasonably high standards." They tend to "place excessive demands on themselves and others, and show impatience, frustration, and indifference toward others’ needs and feelings." |
I’m reminded of one of my own ambitious projects, which I mentioned toward the end of a recent column. The challenge was publishing stories each day on the Intranet of a Fortune 100 company, and maintaining this pace while securing the proper level of approval for every story. It was hectic, but for the first eight months, we succeeded in steering clear of any landmines.
Then one day, a big one blew up in our face: We published important business results that the company hadn’t disclosed yet. One of my writers thought the results were public because he saw them in a press release. He forgot the release he’d seen was only a draft.
This was the sort of blunder early critics of our project warned we would make. They had argued we needed more layers of approval, but those extra layers would have made it impossible for us to meet daily deadlines. To succeed, we needed trust, and we had received it. Now, I feared this one mistake would obliterate that trust.
When I got to work that day, I was called to the office of a VP who had spotted our lapse. I arrived there expecting to get the corporate equivalent of a cigarette and a blindfold. Instead, the VP asked me if I understood the policy I had violated. I did. He asked how it happened. I explained.
“Can you fix it?” he asked. I said the offending paragraph had been yanked. Then he smiled and said, “OK, then. Problem solved.”
When he saw my relief, he assured me I hadn’t been in serious trouble. He said my group was doing great work, and he had no intention of making our jobs any harder. He needed my side of the story to answer a question he had received, and he wanted to verify that it was an honest mistake and not ignorance of the rules. Having done so, he forgave us. The trust placed in us was intact, and our project flourished for years to follow.
The company’s list of Corporate Values did not include “Forgiveness,” but the incident I just described inspired me to adopt it as one of my own. When I hired people, I was almost impatient for them to make their first genuine blunder. There was no better time to give them a message they needed to hear to reach their full potential.
Don’t be cavalier about mistakes, but don’t worry about them either. There’s no way you’ll do your best work if you think you’ll get stepped on every time you drop the ball. If you’re going to like this job and do it well, you need to be excited about success, not anxious about failure. I trust you, and you’d have to screw up routinely for me to lose confidence in you.
The people who worked for me never took my forgiveness as a license to make more mistakes. They saw it instead as a green light to experiment and take intelligent risks. They tackled projects that other groups shied away from, and two of my people won the organization’s most prestigious award for doing so.
In a Level 2 culture, where people compete for status and advantage, mistakes are not forgiven but exploited. Your loss is my gain, or at least my satisfaction. Avoiding mistakes and defusing blame become survival strategies that stifle and supplant the pursuit of excellence. You can’t reach for the stars when you’re covering your backside.
The antidote is the Level 3 virtue of seeing the best in others, especially in those moments when people expect you to be focused on their worst. Forgiveness is invigorating and liberates people to be the best they can be.
– John Keenan, editor
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Last changed: Jun 03 2009 at 12:40 PM