Creating a safe working environment where people can freely talk about their mistakes

Several years ago, when I was just an engineer, I found myself being assigned the task to run some 640 tests to verify a design. As I recall, I had the Friday and the weekend to do this and we had a release dateline to meet come the following Monday. These 640 tests will need a good part of the weekend to complete and we are not expecting any problem. Come the following Monday, we had a clean results (i.e., it passed all the 640 tests) but i realized when I checked everything just to be sure, I had ran some tests with incorrect parameters. Worried that this mistake may delay the release and not wanting to be the person to cause the delay, I lied and declared that all was fine and that we are good to go. While my colleagues prepare to release the design, I worked franticly to re-run those affected tests with the correct parameters. I was very lucky that the design did pass all the 640 tests passed when ran against the correct parameter settings.

About a year after that, I became the project leader for a very similar work but at another company. In the first meeting I had with my team, I told everyone that it is absolutely OK to declare their mistake(s) in my team. Everyone were either puzzled and/or poking fun at what I said. I explained that only by doing so, will the team have the necessary information to know how best to channel resources when something goes wrong and that will allow the team to meet it datelines in the most effective way without impact on quality. The idea here is as follows. If you are the project leader/manager, you will want to know if there is anything that can have an impact on the project. And the easiest most effective way to know about it is to make it safe for your colleagues to tell you about it. It is better to know about these problem(s) earlier where you can channel your resources to rectify them than to allow them to stay hidden where they can bite you at the most embarrassing moment.

To be honest, a strict review or quality gating process to validate the test results of the 640 tests could have done the job as well. However, neither of these approaches on their own is 100% fool proof. I will employ both if I were to find myself in the same position again. Creating a safe environment for people work and even to declare their mistake, free them from having to spend time looking over their shoulder and to focus on doing what adds/creates value.

As usual, this is a real story, but the identity of the person may have been altered and I may not have remembered all the details correctly.

Same goal, different methods and different implications

A discussion between 2 managers recently gave me this insight. One of this manager has a vacancy to fill and he has made an offer to a very good candidate. This candidate has asked to extended the period she has to response a couple of times indicating that she is interviewing elsewhere and wants to wait for the reply from the other companies. She possibly also has a preference for some other organisation/role. The other manager suggested calling the candidate to find ways to secure her service - a very typical approach for someone from an American MNC! The rationale here is that even if the candidate were to reject the offer, he would go down trying. The hiring manager's opinion is to allow the candidate to make up her own mind. This seems so passive until I was told the rationale behind this inaction! It seems that this hiring manager is of the opinion that if the candidate were to accept the offer, she accepted the job on her own free will and this can give him leverage later. This inaction has a much longer term view of the situation than I first perceived. I am aware at this point that I have left a lot of details out and may not paint the full picture!

The difference between the thinking/philosophy of these 2 managers struck me as a short-term versus long-term or even a western versus eastern management philosophy/strategy. What I learned from this is that a person may do things in a way that disagree with our own belief or philosophy and possibly with a rationale potentially more superior than our own!

Information may be power, but he who holds the money has control

I once found myself promoted to a fairly senior position at an organisation where I was still fairly new - compared to many of my subordinates. What amazes me very quickly at the time was the information I had privy to allowed me to make sensible decisions while my subordinates were clueless. It really brings home the point that "information is power." As I was fairly new at the time, I was not given access to the budget of the unit yet. I didn't know how much budget we had left and has no signature authority. That really made me feel powerless each time I need access to the budget. I virtually cannot do anything even when I was able to make meaningful decision for the organisation. I can't approve anything that requires money and things just cannot progress until my manager agrees and approves these requests that require money from the budget he controls. So ultimately, even if access to information empowers you, access to money is what gives you control.