A compliment for the employee who makes the most mistakes

A compliment for the employee who makes the most mistakes

’Move fast and break things’ was Facebook's internal motto for years. Why did this organisation encourage its employees to get going quickly without having to fear making mistakes? Because you learn faster that way and the chance of innovation increases. The image below shows it clearly: you can stay stuck in theory until the cows come home. You hardly learn anything from that. Working in a practical way takes you a little further. But only when you are allowed and dare to make mistakes does your knowledge of a subject really start to stack up.

Learn from mistakes

Making mistakes is therefore the starting point for gaining new knowledge and insight. The intention is of course that you genuinely learn from those mistakes so that you can move forward. Or, the other way round: do not recklessly carry out all kinds of experiments and do not keep making the same mistake over and over.

Employees feel ’stupid’

With its motto, Facebook broke through the culture that prevails in many organisations of above all not making mistakes. With the additional negative effect that employees feel ’stupid’ when they go off the rails once. And, worse still, that they develop a sense of shame that seriously damages their further performance and that of the organisation as a whole.

Protect your employees

As a manager, therefore, create a safe working environment by protecting employees who make mistakes. Talk about those mistakes among yourselves too, however small or large they may be. That is how you teach people not only to celebrate successes together, but also to overcome jointly the obstacles on the way to that same success.

A compliment. Why not?

You could even consider giving a compliment to whoever makes the most unintended mistakes. Why not? Because that is the person who has learned the most.

The MyDrives colours and the first natural reaction to making a mistake

When you have clear insight into the colour profile of your team members, you can make the most of how they think about making mistakes.

-> Turquoise is good at putting a mistake into perspective.

-> Yellow wants to understand how a mistake came about.

-> Green becomes nervous and feels bad towards colleagues.

-> Orange hopes nobody notices the mistake.

-> Blue is self-critical and works out in fine detail where things went wrong.

-> Red is not quick to admit that a mistake was made at all.

-> Purple hopes the team will be forgiving.

In summary

Give employees the room to make mistakes and to learn and grow from them. Then you are doing well as an organisation.