I’ve heard it said that “to err is human.” Given the number of people HR teams work with every day, they are no strangers to addressing their fair share of mistakes.
A recent study indicates that people make an average of 3 to 6 errors per hour and 50 errors per day, no matter the task—and that’s just in their normal day-to-day circumstances. When things get tough because of personal problems, poor health, a lack of sleep, or external pressures, mistakes are bound to rise not only in frequency but also in severity.
Here are five steps HR departments can take to be an ally for leaders as they address these issues and help their teams move forward.
Step 1: Approach the Situation with Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s experience. In HR, you must be able to walk in your colleagues’ shoes to grasp their perspectives and help them succeed.
However, it’s important not to confuse empathy with sympathy. Rather than simply feeling sorry for employees who have made mistakes, focus on understanding where they’re coming from and helping them learn from their errors by remaining open, caring, and honest.
Empathy helps leaders create cultures of trust, build community, foster collaboration, and provide opportunities for growth. While it doesn’t come naturally to all leaders, it can be developed over time through experience, training, and practice. When leaders can effectively show empathy, people who make mistakes come away feeling understood, not judged or blamed.
Step 2: Identify the Underlying Pain Points
The second step in this process is defining the pain points that helped directly or indirectly cause the initial mistake, which begins by addressing the core of the problem. During this step, it’s critical to avoid jumping to conclusions. Even if you already have a good idea of what needs to be addressed, you will gain further insight by obtaining a variety of perspectives on the issue.
As HR teams, you can train your organization’s leaders to ask the right questions and listen carefully to the responses they receive during this step. Ask employees about the problems they encounter during the workday, and ask managers if they’ve noticed issues in recent reports to make note of any strong correlations.
Step 3: Shift the Focus of Conversations from ‘You’ to ‘We’
As the HR team, your goal should be to teach your company to shift toward team-centered vocabulary during conversations in the wake of mistakes. During these talks, leaders can either single out an employee by saying “you” or focus on the team as a whole by saying “we.”
For example, a leader could open a meeting by saying, “Your mistake has really put your team behind schedule,” but this comes off as abrasive and accusatory. Instead, the leader should say something more like, “Our team is really behind schedule, so how can we best work together to get back on track?”
When leaders shift the conversation to “we” language, they help employees feel supported instead of attacked by making it clear that everyone shares the responsibility for fixing the issue.
Step 4: Remember that Mistakes Also Provide Opportunities to Educate
Mistakes are learning opportunities disguised as challenges that leaders can learn to take advantage of and appreciate. As an HR professional, you are one of the most well-equipped people to help show your organization how to view errors through a clearer, more productive lens.
Instead of being afraid or ashamed of mistakes, use them to teach others how certain processes should or shouldn’t be followed. When we stay open-minded, mistakes can indicate a need for change and initiate improvements from within the organization.
Learning from our mistakes helps us remain resilient in the face of future challenges, and having the ability to work through them makes us stronger leaders who possess the ability to help others in similar situations. Mistakes gift us with the wisdom we need to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.
Step 5: Develop Steps to Quickly Resolve the Issue and Prevent Repeated One
Instead of putting out fires every time a mistake happens, HR leaders should be proactive, spotting the cause of errors before they occur so they can stop them from recurring. In place of blame, HR can provide support, resources, training programs, and mentorship opportunities to help employees move forward with actionable, realistic, and sustainable goals.
For example, a goal such as “I will not allow myself to be distracted while I work” is far too broad to effectively accomplish. But breaking the core of the problem—distraction—into bitesize objectives, such as “I will get a drink of water when I feel my mind wander” and “I will turn off notifications on all my devices to improve focus,” helps provide some of the steps necessary to achieve the larger goal.
Mistakes are inevitable, so HR specialists need to be expert allies in helping their organization’s leaders address them. When we help leaders create environments where employees feel comfortable discussing bad workplace decisions, our teams will be far better able to grow and improve together.
Craig Goodliffe is Founder & CEO of Cyberbacker.