As a consultant in Internet and technology strategies, with my partner, we have come to the conclusion that although for companies the technical part is very important, the worst mistakes they make while implementing a strategy on these subjects are in human themes such as the way they structure processes, the company’s culture, the workers empowerment, and the way in which bosses perform their work. This is the reason why I decided to make these series of articles where I will be talking about some common mistakes bosses perform. I think that it can be very helpful for persons who have employees in charge because they can find ways to change them in order to obtain better results in their companies.
The first mistake I wanted to mention is mistaken ways to correct employees. It is true that when we are bosses we have a huge responsibility and with an aggravating factor that is that the results are not only in our hands but also in our team. Many times we have pressure and this make us angry and yell to our team when something that we didn’t expected occurs. Generally this worsens the situation and that is why I call it “mistaken ways to correct”.
In this subject the first thing we must understand as bosses is that there does not exist any formula in which we can assure our people are not going to make mistakes. Controls might help us to minimize them, but there will always be a possibility that our employees err. However yelling at them and become extremely angry will not change anything. As bosses we need to be demanding, but when mistakes occur we must try to find solutions. In other words we should propitiate an environment in which our employees learn from their mistakes and capitalize what they learn.
Before I finish I want to clarify a subject. What I mention in this post doesn’t means that we become permissive and we don’t act when mistakes occur. If our employees frequently commit mistakes and don’t learn from them, most probably we are going to need to terminate their service, but before we get to this phase, we must try that they learn about their mistakes. This generates a trust environment and help among our team.
On my next posts I will present other mistakes we make as bosses. Wait for them!
Image taken from Flickr.com