In October 2018 I stood on a beach near Malaga with a paramotor strapped to my back and sand in my teeth.
It was my second flight of the day. First launch attempt: I tripped on something and face planted. Second attempt: the wing didn't inflate properly. Third attempt: the wing came up to one side, I went down again, and I broke the tip of my propeller.
Nobody shouted at me. The instructors grounded me for a while to let the adrenaline and anger burn off. Then I kept training.
A broken prop tip is a mistake. One event, on one bad day, from a student doing his best. Now picture a different student. He breaks a prop every day for two weeks. He skips the pre-flight checks. He ignores the instructors. Nobody would call those mistakes anymore. They form a pattern, and a pattern needs a different conversation.
Most managers I've worked with blur those two things together. Some treat every slip like a crime. Others treat a year of poor work like a string of unlucky slips. Both get it wrong, and both make the team worse.
The Line a Safe Culture Draws
Sally Gibson runs Dawleys, and when she came on Corey-osity Unleashed she made a point I keep coming back to. Mistakes are learning. Underperformance needs different coaching. A safe culture tells the two apart, and gives people room to say "I made a mistake" without fear of getting beaten up about it.
It sounds obvious. Look at the numbers, though.
Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School asks executives how many of the failures in their organizations deserve blame. They answer in single digits... 2 to 5 percent. Then she asks how many get treated as blameworthy. After a pause or a laugh, they say 70 to 90 percent. She describes this in Strategies for Learning from Failure in Harvard Business Review.
Read those figures again. The people in charge admit to blaming their staff for failures they themselves believe were blameless. Not once. Most of the time.
What Happens When Every Mistake Is a Crime
People stop telling you.
Nobody wakes up wanting to hide a problem. They learn to. They watch what happened to the last person who owned up, and they do the math. If confessing a slip costs more than burying it, they bury it.
Then the slip grows. A typo in a config file becomes an outage. A missed email becomes a lost customer. You find out late, from someone else, and you get angry... which teaches everyone the lesson all over again.
I wrote about this cycle in Culture Isn't Perks. It's How Fast Bad News Reaches You. and about the cost to new ideas in Want Innovation? Stop Punishing the Mistake. Speed of bad news and willingness to try new things both die in the same place: the moment someone gets punished for an honest slip.
What Happens When Underperformance Gets a Free Pass
The opposite failure gets far less attention, and I think it does as much damage.
Some managers want so badly to be kind, every missed deadline becomes "a learning moment." The third missed quarter in a row gets the same gentle chat as the first. The person never hears the truth. The rest of the team picks up the slack and watches you do nothing about it.
Why do we dodge it? Because it's uncomfortable. A Harris Poll survey for Interact of 616 US managers found 69% said they're often uncomfortable communicating with employees. Over a third, 37%, said they're uncomfortable giving direct feedback about performance if they think the employee might respond badly.
Calling underperformance a mistake feels generous. It isn't. It denies the person the one thing they need most: an honest picture of where they stand, early enough to fix it. Too often the first clear signal arrives as a formal improvement plan. By then the relationship has soured and the outcome feels decided.
I made this point about renaming failure in Calling It a Learning Moment Doesn't Make It One. A kind label on the wrong problem helps nobody.
Console, Coach, or Sanction
The best framework I've found for this comes from safety, not management. David Marx, who expanded the idea of a fair, accountable safety culture into healthcare, splits behavior into three buckets in his talk Console, Coach, or Punish?:
- Human error. An inadvertent slip, lapse, or mistake. The person did something other than what they meant to do. Response: console, then fix the process, training, or design behind it.
- At-risk behavior. A choice where the person doesn't see the risk, or believes it's justified. The shortcut everyone takes because it saves ten minutes. Response: coach, and remove whatever rewards the shortcut.
- Reckless behavior. A conscious choice to disregard a substantial and unjustifiable risk. Response: sanction.
The key idea, as Wikipedia's summary of the model puts it, is to link discipline to the behavior, not the harm. A nurse who makes an honest error with a bad outcome gets consoled. A nurse who knowingly skips a check gets held to account, even if nothing went wrong.
Marx built this for patient safety, not performance reviews. I find it maps well anyway. A one-off mistake is human error. Underperformance usually lives in the middle bucket: a drift into habits nobody challenged. The reckless bucket is rare, and you'll know it when you see it.
What I like most is the first word. Console. When someone makes an honest mistake, your first job is to help them recover, not to judge them. My instructors in Malaga understood this. They grounded me to let me calm down, not to punish me.
Four Questions Before You React
When something goes wrong, I try to run through four questions before I open my mouth.
Has this happened before?
Once is an event. The same thing three times is a pattern. Keep notes. Your memory will betray you in both directions... inflating one bad week, or forgetting six months of drift.
Did they know what good looked like?
If nobody told them the standard, the failure belongs to you, not them. I covered this in Your Job Spec Lists Skills. Nobody Wrote Down What Great Looks Like.
Did they choose the shortcut, or did the system hand it to them?
If everyone on the team takes the same shortcut, look at the system before you look at the person.
Did they tell me, or did I find out?
Someone who walks up to you and says "I messed up" has done the hardest part already. Reward the telling, every single time, even while you deal with the problem.
Say Where the Line Is, Out Loud
Your team shouldn't have to guess which bucket they're in. Tell them.
Try something like this: "If you make a mistake, tell me fast and we'll fix it together. No drama. If I see a pattern, I'll tell you fast too, and we'll talk about it straight."
Both halves matter. Promise only the first and people won't believe it, because they've seen what happens to the colleague nobody ever challenged. Promise only the second and nobody will own up to anything.
In my own research, 99.5% of people told me they'd had one or more types of bad boss. I'd bet both versions of this failure show up in their stories: the boss who blew up over every slip, and the boss who never said a word until the day it was too late.
You don't have to be either one.
Think back to the last three things at work you got angry about. Which were events, and which were patterns? Did your response match?