If the first thing you hear when something goes wrong is “Who did that?”, then you should know there is something wrong! No I don’t mean what happened, but what is going to happen and how the situation will be handled.
Good leaders know that things go wrong, some times for no reason. They know nothing is perfect and accept that nobody is perfect.
Whenever they have a situation, good leaders do the following:
- Put the team together to handle the situation
- Evaluate the situation and compile a list of possible solutions
- Recruit a solution and apply it
- Perform post mortem analysis to understand how things went wrong and how they can be avoided in the future
- Acknowledge and thank team members who helped
- If any, discuss what went wrong with the responsible person, guide her to conclude how this can be avoided in the future and agree on action items
- Share lessons learned with the team and move forward
I believe, people are the most important asset that any leader should capitalize one. Jumping to conclusion and blaming people for things they did not do or they were not responsible for is the worse thing to happen. It leaves traces worse than the issue it self and yields higher losses on the long term.
Hold your horses, fix the situation, understand it and focus on learning from it.
Enjoy leadership!
Ala' Yasin Abuhijleh 