Leadership Incidents

Last week I talked about Manager Bugs, which are the commonplace mistakes managers or leaders make. This week I’m talking about Leadership Incidents—the bigger failures that hurt more and are harder to recover from.

In software engineering we talk about bugs, which are when something isn’t working correctly, and incidents, which are when something is flat-out broken. A bug is when a web page misformats your phone number. An incident is when that web site won’t even load. 

The leadership equivalent of an incident causes a lot of pain to the people around you. It happens when you  made a bad decision, or a fairly good one that has significant unintended consequences that you need to address. Whatever it is, it sucks, and you know it, and the people around you know it. 

Here are some examples, many of which are mine. You hire the wrong person. You hire the wrong person and take way too long to figure it out and do something about it. You push to release something to hit a desired date and ship something unacceptably buggy. You wait too long for something to be perfect and miss a market opportunity. You make a big decision with incomplete information and now everyone is scrambling to make things work. You provide an atrocious answer to a question at an all-hands. You lose your temper and say things that are inconsistent with your values. And so on.

There are so many wonderfully terrible ways we can screw up and each of them needs a recovery plan specific to that situation. Recovering from an incident takes more time than recovering from a bug. In both you should quickly admit the problem and start fixing it. But, manager bugs are usually fixed quickly, leadership incidents are not. Lapses in values and the repercussions of major bad decisions take time. You have to be patient and persistent through the repair cycle.

Here’s a story that I think has a broadly useful lesson.

Several years ago I worked with a leader who sent a passionate, opinionated, late-night department-wide email that truly pissed off most of the people in his organization. While he had good intentions, it landed wrong for a lot of, to my mind, legitimate and foreseeable reasons. When he started to to hear the rumbles, he immediately told people that he knew he’d screwed up, and invited people to set up time to talk with him to give him one-one-one feedback and help him understand why he should have known better. He didn’t rely on that, but also reached out to people he knew might have good insight and initiated talks with them as well. A few weeks later, at an all hands, he humbly apologized and explained his plan for doing better going forward. It was clear that he’d learned a lot from the conversations that he’d had. As a result, most people’s opinions of him went UP. Yes, he’d screwed up, but his thoughtful, sincere, and public apology showed he was a leader that they could trust to be honest and to learn from his mistakes. He also he set an inspiring example by being accountable for his failure.

In engineering terms, what that leader did was the equivalent of an in-depth and transparent post-mortem and recovery plan. Compare that to an incident response along the lines of "yeah, we might have had a problem but trust us, it's fixed!"  

Your recovery plan from a leadership incident is going to depend on the specifics of the situation. I’m going to give you two pieces of advice that are fairly universal. 

First, as the leader in my story did, make sure you really understand the repercussions. Don’t wait to start a recovery plan, do that right away. But include in the plan the work and time for you to dig deep and get a broad set of input on what happened. 

Then, follow through with patience. It can take time for things to recover, both on the human side and the practical side. By persistently following through on your action plan, and patiently giving people time to process and recover, you can provide the stability people crave in leaders.

Your dot release: Since I hope you won’t need this often, think of a past leadership incident and who you could have talked to make sure you understood the fallout. If it’s possible, go back to a few of those folks and ask for their insight now. Would it have changed your recovery plan? Is there anything you want to do now, even though some time has passed? If you’re hesitant to do this, consider that showing that you’re still thinking and learning from a past mistake is an awesome characteristic in a leader. 

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