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Reports : Dealing with Setbacks in Business
Dealing with setbacks and hard times is an inevitable part of the management role writes Pete Rogan of Future Positive Consulting. Getting it wrong, he says, can mean we get trapped in a career-long credibility crunch
The right approach to setbacks can increase hassle and reduce success. In this article, Pete offers tips on how to manage and avoid setbacks effectively
“Mistakes are brilliant because they not only teach us where we went wrong but also how to fix it.” (Templar)
Not everyone (or indeed every business) has a healthy relationship with mistakes, either their own or others’. It’s a sensitive area, a tightrope to be walked with skill and awareness. If the tightrope is walked successfully there is the prize of ownership, responsibility learning and growth. Dealing with it badly means generating resentment, damaging confidence, engagement and commitment.
Reacting in a negative (and possibly angry) way can be very therapeutic. It provides a release for frustration, it makes us feel better (for a short while at least), it gives us someone to blame which can bring some sense of feeling superior and blameless. It is also extremely costly and damaging to us and our business. Each of us trades on our reputation and results and this toxic behaviour damages both.
Bill Shankly’s “Happenings”
The spirit of how we deal with errors, problems and setbacks is vital. The ex-Liverpool manager Bill Shankly had a great approach. He viewed mistakes as “happenings”. They were simply things that had happened that he didn’t want to happen again. So he sat with the team and discussed “what had happened”, “why it had happened” and “how it could be stopped from happening again”. At first pass it may sound a bit corny, but it makes sound psychological sense and worked a treat. It’s part of the reason why, 28 years after he died, not only are his successes remembered but he is still held with great respect and affection as one of the game’s true legends.
There are three main ways to go when setbacks in performance occur. You can:
- Ignore it. This avoids some possible short-term discomfort. You can hope that people’s own awareness and motivation will lead them to spot it and solve it themselves. However, usually nothing is learned, and people may believe that because you said nothing you either didn’t notice or don’t care.
- React positively: Discuss it openly, honestly and in a calm, balanced, adult way, understanding the reasons, identifying the solutions and devising preventative measures to avoid recurrence. It is the most direct, relevant and fastest way of solving problems and preventing recurrence. It is extremely well-targeted learning and development for individuals and the team. It brings improvements with an immediate impact on results and relationships. Handled with maturity, skill and perspective many problems can be turned into growth, development and opportunity and individual and business improvement. As such it is the very essence of working smarter, using intelligence to solve problems (indeed using problems as the catalyst to improve awareness, thinking and increase intelligence).
- React negatively to it. Be critical, harsh or punishing in what you say and what you do. While it may make people aware of what is wrong and that you’ve noticed and that you care, if you offer little in the way of explanation, direction or encouragement people will switch off and shut down. Criticism is like dynamite. It’s very powerful but also destructive and great care and skill is required in deciding where to stick it and when to light the fuse! Being criticised harshly is upsetting and stressful. People who are stressed and upset and have had their self-esteem knocked don’t tend to be good at listening, analysing and coming out the comfort zone to try new ways of thinking and behaving. Some, fearing your reaction will deny any error, make excuses or cover it up. Some will actively push back and become defensive and closed-minded, arguing and justifying their own position and blaming others. The more they rehearse their own arguments the more they persuade themselves that they are right and that you are wrong. Other people will just withdraw. Many will already have been feeling bad about the mistake. The criticism will just increase the sense of guilt and shame. Embarrassed, angry and afraid to speak out, their confidence and motivation damaged they’ll disengage from you and your opinions, ideas and suggestion and not learn or change. Either way, when we criticize with insufficient skill and judgment the lesson goes unlearned and we’re doomed to a repeat of the same mistakes. It’s worse than useless, it’s actively damaging.
Ignoring or reacting negatively to mistakes creates a double-whammy. Not only are the benefits of handling it well missed but with relationships damaged and nothing learned, the risk of a recurrence (and indeed more mistakes on other things) has increased not decreased. It’s the high-risk, high-hassle low-success approach. It makes no human sense or business sense.
Five levels of error – the higher we go the worse it gets
This highlights the different levels of mistakes and errors and their costs and implications:
- Level one mistakes are errors and misjudgments in task performance. These are unwelcome and need to be addressed: That is, understood, learned from, fixed and avoided in the future.
- A level two error is choosing a response to mistakes and setbacks that kills the ownership, commitment and creativity and makes things worse in the short-term and long-term. Level two errors hamstring and handicap learning and adaptation and kill discretionary potential and so impose significant limitations on a business, with an associated increase in risk and opportunity costs. They virtually guarantee that the same mistakes will be repeated and create a downward spiral. This becomes further entrenched as mutual frustration turns to conflict which can calcify into entrenched and blinkered views and hardened feelings. Level-one mistakes are inevitable and with the right approach can be solved and recurrence prevented easily in most cases. Level two mistakes are avoidable own-goals, they are down to managers’ attitudes, skills and style.
- A level three mistake is not reflecting after the event and realizing our approach was wrong.
- A level four mistake is believing that we could never be wrong and so we don’t have to examine our own approach.
- Level five is turning all this into a cultural norm, creating a fear or blame culture. In trying to eradicate failure by shooting the messenger the ecology for a failure-phobic culture is created: Failure is hidden or denied rather than admitted and discussed. There is no discussion and no learning so failure is doomed to recur. Feeling insecure, frustrated and out of control, it reinforces some managers’ failure-phobia.
Few level-one setbacks seriously damage performance and results in the short term, far less the long term. It is how, as managers and teams we interpret it, what meaning we give to those mistakes and what we do next that determines the short-term and long-term impact on the business. It’s a choice between the upward spiral of success or the downward spiral of stagnation and self-perpetuating underperformance.
The bottom line: Quick summary
We can save ourselves a whole bunch of avoidable short and long term difficulty by ensuring we deal with level one mistakes in a direct professional way. It can increase responsibility, learning improvement, motivation and growth. It enhances our reputation and results, reducing hassle and increasing our success.
Written by Peter Rogan on behalf of the Future Positive Team: May 2009
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