How a screwup turned into a reminder of the power of psychological safety
Last month, I witnessed the most incredible thing on my team. Rachel, our Chief of Content, screwed up and owned it—and it was the best screwup ever.
First, some context: Rachel is responsible for publishing our weekly blog posts to our website and email subscribers. Since we launched the blog a few years ago, the posts have always arrived in our subscribers’ inboxes on Tuesdays at 8 a.m. Eastern Time. But this week’s post didn't.
At around 5 p.m. the day the blog was supposed to go out, Rachel was getting ready to log off for the day when she realized that the blog hadn’t been sent to our email subscribers. It took only a couple minutes of investigating for her to realize what had happened: Turns out that she had followed all the steps for publishing the blog except the very last one. She had forgotten to hit the “schedule” button. Whoops!
I later learned that when she figured out what happened, she knew the solution was to simply send out the blog, but she hesitated. We always publish blogs at 8 a.m. It was now 5 p.m., and she thought that maybe she should schedule it to go out the following morning. She considered sending our team a message right then to tell us about what happened and ask what we thought the best course of action was—but she stopped herself. She knew that I and the rest of the team trust her to make decisions. She also knew that the consequences of making the wrong decision would be minimal and would not put her job in jeopardy. In the end, she reasoned that people expected to receive the blog on Tuesdays, so it should go out that day, even if it was many hours late. She hit “send,” and then she sent a message to our team explaining what happened and how she fixed it, and she apologized for her mistake.
Here’s the thing: I didn’t even notice that the blog hadn’t gone out. Had Rachel never acknowledged it, I wouldn’t have known. I thanked Rachel for owning her mistake and reminded her that she has permission to screw up.
In our team meeting the following day, Cheyenne (our Chief of Operations) gave Rachel a high five for the message that she sent to the team. Cheyenne acknowledged that she also didn’t realize that the blog hadn’t gone out on time and celebrated Rachel for choosing to own a misstep that no one on the team would have likely noticed. Cheyenne then went on to say that she was proud of the culture we have built together that makes people feel safe to own up to even the smallest of mistakes.
And then THAT led to a conversation about the best time to publish the blog, and we became curious about the results of the blog going out at 5 p.m. vs. 8 a.m. And guess what: Turns out that that blog had the highest click-through and open rates of any of our recent posts—by a landslide!
That’s when we all started laughing and told Rachel she made the best screwup ever. We decided that from now on, she will schedule blogs to go out at 4:30 p.m. Eastern on Tuesdays, and we’ll see if the results show a higher open rate. We would have never even thought to change the publishing time had Rachel not forgotten to publish that post!
I wanted to share this story because I think it’s a powerful lesson. To me, it shows how our screwups can be our best learnings. It also demonstrates why creating cultures where we can talk about and own our mistakes leads to innovation and growth.
Here are some ways that you can build a culture like this on your team:
Be a leader who owns your screwups: When we admit our missteps out loud, we make it safe for others to do so.
Incorporate discussions about mistakes into team meetings: On our team, we talk about what isn't working and what we're learning from it every single week during our team meetings to humanize this topic and shift the mindset from what went wrong to how we can grow from the experience.
Make sure the team knows you have their backs: When it comes to empowering people to take risks and run with things, it's important to make sure that they know that they're safe to do so. One of the ways we do this on our team is by saying that as long as people are making decisions with our values in mind, we will always have their backs, and they never have to worry about losing their jobs. Where we draw the line is when someone goes against our values. That’s a dealbreaker.
Explore your screwup tolerance: I believe that the cost of preventing people from failing is way higher than the cost of letting people make mistakes and learn from them. I think that the more we protect people from messing up, the more we limit their ability to build self-confidence and feel empowered. It’s up to each of us to determine what our screwup tolerance is (mine is high!), and the more we can expand it, the more we can help others grow.
I really believe that there is nothing more important to the health and trust of a team than a strong sense of psychological safety. I am grateful to Rachel and her screwup for reminding me of that and inspiring this post. Imagine how much more we can do when we give ourselves—and our teams—the permission to screw up!
Big hugs,
