You just messed up. In fact, you just caused a problem that is going to cost your company time, money, and trust. How you and your company react is the difference between a high-performing organization and a low-performing one. Let’s walk through an example with a step-by-step analysis:
The (hypothetical) situation
Let’s say you just committed an unforced error and lost your company $1 million dollars. Whether you work at a giant behemoth or a small startup, that’s a lot of money and will trigger things like postmortems and executive review. It may even show up on your public disclosures if you’re a publicly traded company.
So, what happens next?
What’s your immediate reaction when you realize what happened? Do you go into panic mode, blame yourself, and secretly hope no one notices? Do you try to rope others into the situation and spread the blame? Do you fear you’ll lose your job?
If you work in a company with a high level of psychological safety, you probably answered something along the lines of “no, I won’t be fired but my boss and team (and I) would be bummed.” You’ll discuss it with your team, own up to the mistake, and figure out how to best avoid the same mistake twice. This could be done via a formal postmortem, a compliance analysis, and executive review, or other scaled operations tracking.
But if you work in a place with low psychological safety, you are likely worried that you’ll be fired, everyone will gang up on you, your manager will put a target on your back, and the rumor mill will start churning. In fact, you may likely not say anything about it until someone else discovers the error and has to spend a lot of time figuring out who did it, what other damage was done, if it’s a systemic risk, etc.
The dangers of working with low psychological safety
As you can see, a workplace with low psychological safety is not only uncomfortably stressful but it’s downright dangerous. Your team, company, and customers will all feel the effects of every little issue because every small mistake metastasizes into something much bigger and significant. For example, if you make a big mistake and don’t say anything, it’ll very likely turn into a bigger issue like a company cover-up, a negative news story, missed earnings reports where no one knows why there was a sudden drop in revenue, etc. The list goes on but you get the idea.
How problems resolve in a blameless company culture
The easy way to tell if you work at a company with high levels of psychological safety is when problems happen. When something goes wrong in a blameless company culture, here’s what will likely happen:
- The problem occurs.
- The responsible party (individual or group) comes forward and flags the issue.
- Leadership dig in and figure out how things went wrong and what potential outcomes may be.
- Once the near-term risks are mitigated, a postmortem or situation review is conducted to figure out the exact cause and if the problem could happen again.
- A fix is put in place.
- No one loses their job, career, or weekend.
As someone who has run teams of teams that have indeed made mistakes (I’m comfortable admitting that and all professionals to do the same), this is honestly what a typical operational response flow looks like. It’s not hard. It’s not overly complex. We have a templated postmortem review process that is often filled out by the person who made the error and their manager then reviewed by leadership. Importantly, the review is written with no names included and it’s focused solely on the business process that had the issue. It’s not “Jeff messed up a vendor contract” it’s instead “the vendor contract had this issue…”
If there are recurring issues with the person or group that caused the problem, it’s time to explore performance improvement plans and more direct intervention. That’s a story for another article, though.
A quick way to test if you have a blameless culture
The next time you or your company goes through an escalation or problem, look at how leadership and your colleagues handle it. Is the first thing they do point fingers? Or do they work the problem and not try to throw others under the proverbial bus? It’s a simple and fool-proof way to figure out what kind of working environment you’re in.
