Leadership / Trust / Mistakes
When An Employee Lets You Down
Your reaction shapes the culture.
Sooner or later, no matter how good (or bad) a leader you are, an employee is going to drop the ball. They’re going to fail at something, maybe important, maybe not so important, but they’re going to fail. How you respond in that moment and how you deal with the aftermath are critical. Critical to you as a leader, critical to the organization, critical to the employee, and critical to all the employees who witness the situation, or even just hear about it.
Someone once said the root of disappointment is in expectations. As a leadership trainer with 30+ years of experience, I list expectations as one of the Top Four things leaders must communicate regularly. When I’m doing communication training for leaders, I hit this hard. Then I hit it again. After I move on to the next topic, I refer back to it. Because it’s that important.
Let’s start with a case where you haven’t communicated what was expected. You expected Sebastian to coordinate with marketing, accounting, and the supply chain manager, but you didn’t tell him to do it. Sebastian had never…
