Are Your Employees Terrified of Making Mistakes?

If your employees are afraid of the consequences of making a mistake, your business will
suffer. Usually, the source of such reluctance to make mistakes can be traced back to the
company’s owners or upper managers. In today’s Workshop, Jeffrey Moses offers some
suggestions for correcting such a situation.

A good rule for maintaining happy, productive employees is to be quick to praise, slow to
criticize. When employees are exposed to constant, rigid evaluations of their work, or when
mistakes are criticized excessively, they tend to become extremely cautious when handling
any situation out of the ordinary.

This can be a huge problem, since almost every meeting with customers involves something
that is "out of the ordinary." By its very nature, customer relations requires creative,
innovative solutions to problems. When employees feel that they might be reprimanded for
even the slightest errors in judgment or company protocol, their responses to customer
requests, complaints or suggestions will become extremely narrow. After all, employees
may feel, why jeopardize their job or future advancement just to satisfy one customer? When
such an attitude begins to permeate a small company, customers notice. They begin to feel
that their needs don’t matter. Over time, this can be a death knell to the company.

A culture of blame and "gotcha" usually leads to an uncreative bunch of employees. Since
the success of many small companies has been founded on creativity, when innovations
decline or cease altogether, a company is in trouble.

For these reasons, small business owners should foster an atmosphere that encourages
innovation and risk-taking — to a certain point, of course. Creative companies realize that
innovation and risk-taking inevitably result in a certain level of mistakes. Of course, you can’t
just look the other way when mistakes are made. But you can work with employees in a way
that the mistakes are not considered as something to be avoided at all costs. Also, the
consistency of criticism must be maintained. When employees are rewarded for something
one minute, then taken to task for something equivalent the next minute, they don’t know
where they stand with management. This uncertainty can lead to paralysis and reluctance to
attempt anything without approval of management.

Often, it is the personalities of managers that result in the over-emphasis upon mistakes, at
the expense of nurturing a creative, free-flowing employee environment. If you’ve noticed this
in your business, you might want to consider a change.

Home