how to own a mistake as a boss

Summary

as a leader, the dumbest thing you can do is pretend you didn’t make a mistake your team already knows about. it doesn’t get you out of it. it just drains the credibility account. here’s how to handle it.

1. extreme ownership by Jocko Willink opens with a blue on blue, friendly fire in combat. he asks the room whose fault it was. people kept raising their hands. I read it fresh out of the military and I knew immediately the answer was Jocko’s. that’s the standard. the leader owns it.

2. in the military you can technically keep the job and lose the team. once you lose credibility, people still show up. they don’t stay late. they don’t have your back. that’s worse than getting fired.

3. I overpaid an employee early on. structured a comp plan that wouldn’t scale as expenses grew. when it became a real problem, I had three options. keep paying because I was scared to confront it. fire them with no explanation. or own it, lay out the math, and renegotiate. I picked option three. they stayed.

4. another time I had a team member work for weeks on a marketing strategy I was sure would work. it didn’t. I had to apologize, own that I burned their time, and commit to better due diligence next time.

5. ownership has two parts. people get the first one and skip the second. part one is admit the mistake without defensiveness. part two is propose the solution. without the solution, you just look incompetent. with the solution, you maintain or even gain credibility.

don’t oversell vulnerability either. admitting a mistake every meeting starts to look like a different problem. confident, competent, and honest when it matters. that’s leadership. try harder.

Transcript

leading yourself first

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. This is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon. And today I’m talking a little bit more about leadership. I’ve been talking more about leadership lately because I have an upcoming speaking engagement in which the topic is leadership.

I also have some online presentations where a lot of people are going to attend talking about leadership. And so I’ve just been thinking through a lot of ideas. You know, I get a lot of questions about it. Not that I’ve mastered leadership in any sense, but just my experience in the military. I’ve always had people working with me, working for me in that capacity.

So it’s something I’ve really been interested in and something I want to be good at. Something I have to do in my family each and every single day. And if you hear me talk about leadership, that I think leading yourself is the most important form of leadership. Being able to be confident in your decisions and make the right decisions for yourself every single day.

I think that’s a huge part of leadership and getting other people to be comfortable following you. But what happens when it’s not going so well? And that’s what I want to talk about today. How to own mistakes when you’re a leader. So when you’re a little bit, you know, when you’re a, let’s say a follower or an employee and you make a mistake, I feel like it’s not that hard to own it.

Now, maybe a lot of employees don’t want to, but if you make a mistake, you should own it. Hey, that was my mistake and here’s how I’m going to correct it. But as a boss, there’s a lot of ego involved, right? It’s a little bit harder to admit that you made a mistake. Even when every single employee is going to be completely aware of the fact that you made a mistake.

So I think the worst thing that you could do when you make a mistake as a boss, as a leader, as the person in charge is to try and act like you did not make a mistake. It might, you might think that you swept it under the rug and that’s not a big deal. Nobody’s going to notice you’re in charge. Why does it matter?

jocko and the blue on blue

But that’s exactly where you start to lose a little bit of your credibility. And so I want to urge you to own the mistakes. If you are a boss, if you are an entrepreneur, you’re in charge of other human beings, you’re a leader. You have to own them. I’ll never forget when one of my favorite books on leadership is Extreme Ownership written by Jocko Willink and he opens with a story about a blue on blue, which is basically a friendly KIA.

So somebody on the same team was killed in action by their own people. And that’s like the worst thing that can happen in the military. And I remember he was going through the debrief and he was like trying to make it a little bit dramatic and he’s whose fault was this? And one guy would say, it was my fault.

And then he kept asking and another guy would ask, say, it’s my fault. All this over and over again. But I remember when I was reading that book, I was fresh out of the military. The second he said, whose fault is this? I was like, it’s your fault, Jocko. Like I knew immediately. I was like, it’s your fault.

And that’s ultimately what he says. But in the military, that’s a really ownership is everything like you. If you don’t own something in the military, it’s a quick way to lose all your credibility because in the military you can get fired. You have to be like absolutely awful to get fired, but there’s something way worse than getting fired.

And that’s losing your credibility as a leader because you can have people, you can technically be in charge, right? You can have people working underneath you, but once you lose credibility, you still have the job, but you don’t have a team. You don’t have a team who’s committed to working the longer hours, staying in until the job’s done.

They’re going to, they’re going to want to go home as soon as possible. They’re not really looking out for you. They don’t have your back. And that’s what happens when you lose credibility. And so I think when you make a mistake, the easiest thing for you to do that, I don’t want to say easy. It’s the most simple thing that you can do is immediately address the, to your team that you did make a mistake, be like, Hey, whatever the case is, I made a mistake.

This didn’t work out how I thought it would. And this can happen when a lot of different situations, it could happen because we make a lot of decisions and we don’t have, we don’t have as much data to go off of. Sometimes when an entrepreneur, like we’re just making it up as we go, we’re just half having to put things together.

the credibility account

Like mistakes I’ve made overpaying employees, I’ve made that mistake early on, very early on. I don’t need to get into the exact metrics, but I basically put one employee on a payment scale that was going to have them when the company scaled, it was going to be an unsustainable pay scale. Like it would like their pay was going to forever grow.

But as we took on more expenses, I didn’t tie their, their, the growth of their role into any side and into any sort of profitability. And as we started to scale, it started to become a huge problem because we were taking on, like I said, a lot more expenses, the profit was getting lower, but I didn’t tie that to this company, this employee’s compensation.

So I came to a really hard decision of, I’m either going to have to fire this person because I made a mistake or just completely own the mistake and let them know, Hey, we have to work out a new comp plan. I made a mistake and I could have three options. I could have just continued paying this person too much money because I’m scared to scared of confrontation.

Some people would do that. The other option is I could have fired them and not really said why she’d be like, yeah, you’re fired. Sorry, I can’t do this anymore because I don’t want to admit my mistake. That would be my other option. The third option is to have a tough conversation and that’s to be like, Hey, here’s why I made this decision early on.

Let me show you the numbers now and how this doesn’t work out at scale. And we have to talk about a new comp plan. Like it has to change. I can’t, we can’t sustain this as a company. And if you want to leave because of my mistake, I completely understand that, but ultimately we’ll have to make some changes.

And ultimately we ended up making some changes and, and that was fine. And I had to have those, have those conversations as hard conversations. I had to back my way out of it. I had to own it. I had to communicate the full picture of what was going on and the employee ended up being okay with the change.

I’ve also had employees do a ton of work on, let’s say it’s like a marketing effort. Hey, this is going to be a ton of work and ultimately it didn’t work. Like the strategy I wanted them to work on didn’t work. It was essentially a humongous waste of their time. And I was like really confident going in that this was going to be a good, a good strategy was going to work out for us.

the overpaid employee

But I didn’t communicate the fact that this maybe isn’t the most important thing that they should be working on. It should be like auxiliary to some of their other tasks and, and all these other things. I was pretty confident it was going to work out. It didn’t work out. And I just had to completely own that mistake.

Basically apologize and be like, Hey, look, I thought that this was going to be the best use of your time. It wasn’t. I’ll try and do a little bit more due diligence in the future. But I did, I totally messed up on this one. And you just have to like let people know that you’re human. You make mistakes.

Everyone makes mistakes. I put my best foot forward here. I really thought it was going to work and it didn’t work. And I wasted a ton of your time. And I value everyone’s time and I won’t, I won’t do that again without making sure that the theory is going to be a little bit more sound, a little bit more proven.

And so when you have to step to owning a decision, the first thing is just make sure that you own it and be ready to have the conversation and don’t get defensive. Don’t try and just overly justify it because there, there’s a fine line, right? Like you don’t want to show too much weakness as a leader, but at the same time, I really don’t think that you’re going to be battling with that.

Like, I do think that you can overshare vulnerability and this might ruffle some feathers. Some people disagree with this, but I think as a leader, it’s not your job to be vulnerable every second of the day. Like some vulnerability. Yeah. Admitting mistakes. You’re not trying to pretend like you’re perfect, but if you end up looking like an idiot to your employees because you’re just admitting mistakes every single day that you show up to a meeting, people might start to be like, I’m not sure if I want to work for this person.

So there is a certain part of confidence you have to have in a leader. The decisions you are making are the right decisions and Hey, the decision has been made. This is what we’re doing there. There’s a lot of that. You need the confidence aspect of that. So don’t over commit to what I’m saying in this ownership side to where, like I said, you look like an idiot.

You just look like you’re not very confident or very competent in what you’re doing. You don’t want to be that, go down that road, but you do want to absolutely own any mistakes that you make and have the hard conversations with employees about the mistakes you made and then talk about what you’re doing to correct it.

own it, then propose the fix

And this is the biggest thing I see missed when someone’s trying to own something. This ownership idea is you can’t just own something and it’s okay. That’s all me, dog. That’s all me. And that’s all you say. Like that’s ownership, right? It’s like admitting that it was your mistake, but that’s not solving the problem.

So what you have to do when you own something, and this is part two and the final part is after you own it, admit the mistake. Hey, here’s what I did wrong. Here’s why I thought it was going to work. It didn’t work. Here’s what we’re going to do about it. Here’s the change. Here’s how we’re going to change the compensation plan.

Here’s the new strategy that’s going to be more effective and how much time I need you to spend on it. I’m going to communicate a little bit more. I’m going to get a little bit more involved. That’s the second part. What’s the solution? And I think the solution is where you either maintain your credibility or you earn more credibility because if you just admit you made a mistake, no matter what, your credibility is going down a little bit.

They might think that you’re not as competent. Something’s headed in the wrong direction. But once you propose and you talk about the solution, I think you have now at least maintained the credibility you had or even earned a little bit more because most people know that you’re human and that you’re going to make mistakes.

That’s going to happen. But then when you have a new solution and you’re confident in the new solution and it works, you have gained more credibility. So I know this stuff is tough. It’s very difficult. It’s hard to have the difficult conversations and to own things, admit the mistakes and then also find the solution.

But leadership is not easy. And if you wanted something easy, maybe you should not be in the better human business and you should try a little bit harder.