As a leader, have you developed organizational resilience? Let me ask: How does your organization bounce back after a mistake?
To be sure, great leaders model how to make ethical, wise decisions for all their employees. Many have led the way in revising organizational codes of conduct, ethics training, DEI training, and communication practices. And yet, mistakes can still happen.
How organizations respond to errors can determine their success, or demise. We begin with attitude.
We know from research that people who are naturally resilient have an optimistic explanatory style: they explain adversity in optimistic terms to avoid the trap of feelings of helplessness. Resilient, persistent cultures interpret setbacks as temporary, local and changeable. They know that, “This too, shall pass.”
In contrast, a pessimistic explanatory culture interprets setbacks as permanent, universal and immutable. They believe that, “It’s no use.”
Part of the problem is our human tendency to blame. We perceive and react to errors, mistakes, and failure inappropriately. We either avoid blame or assign it. Or, we overact with self-criticism. I wrote about this in a previous post, here.
Organizational Resilience and the Blame Game
According to psychologist Saul Rosenzweig, we experience frustration and anger, often the triggers of the blame game, based on our personality categories:
- Extrapunitive: Prone to unfairly blame others
- Impunitive: Denies that failure has occurred or one’s own role in it
- Intropunitive: Judges self too harshly and imagines failures where none exist
These personalities influence a corporate culture. Extrapunitive responses are common in the business world—you don’t have to look far to see it. Shifting the blame from one entity to another (or individual) is common. To be sure, some mistakes are blameworthy. But to build organizational resilience and bounce back from a mistake, you want to use your energy in more productive ways.
- Listen and communicate. Most of us forget to gather enough feedback and information before reacting, especially when it comes to bad news. Never assume you have all the information until you ask probing questions.
- Reflect on both the situation and the people. We’re good at picking up patterns and making assumptions. Remember, however, that each situation is unique and has context.
- Think before you act. You don’t have to respond immediately or impulsively. You can always make things worse by overreacting in a highly charged situation.
- Search for a lesson. Look for nuance and context. Sometimes a colleague or a group is at fault, sometimes you are, and sometimes no one is to blame. Create and test hypotheses about why the failure occurred to prevent it from happening again.
- Make amends. Acknowledge responsibility for wrong doing, and take action to redress that wrong.
Make Amends After a Mistake
How? In Moral Repair (Cambridge University Press, 2012), Margaret Urban Walker describes making amends as taking reparative action, but only action that issues from an acceptance of responsibility for wrong doing, and that embodies the will to set right something for which amends are owed.
This is not unlike some of the steps in recovery programs, such as Alcoholics Anonymous:
- Step 8: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
- In other words, to my knowledge, this is who our organization has harmed, and we would like to do what we can to correct our mistake.
- Step 9: Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
- In other words, we accept full responsibility for our mistakes, and we will do what we can to correct this mistake.
- Step 10: Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
- In other words, we will continue to monitor our attitudes and actions, and when we are wrong, we will promptly admit it.
Making amends builds resilience, for individuals, and organizations. Those who have mastered the art of being wrong practice it, every day.
What do you think? How do you build organizational resilience? How does your organization bounce back after a mistake? I’d love to hear from you. You can reach me here, on LinkedIn, or give me a call: 561-582-6060.
