Charlotte A. Martin hates the word mistake.
“We want people to take risks, so you can’t very well hang them up to dry for a mistake if you want a culture of risk-taking and constant improvement,” she says.
The president and chief operating officer of Gateway EDI LLC refers to herself as the chief cultural officer, and in that role, she fosters an environment of risk-taking and idea-suggesting in order to develop employees and, ultimately, the company. Essentially, instead of bringing negative attention to mistakes, the company uses “training opportunities” to identify steps that could have been taken and ways employees can learn from the incident.
The positive spin has helped the electronic data interchange provider’s 260 employees generate $39 million in 2008 revenue. Now, not only are employees taking risks and responsibility for their actions, a Process Improvement Team has been created to encourage employees to take the lead on their ideas for company improvements.
Smart Business spoke with Martin about how to develop employees through a culture of learning.
Live the culture you want. The first thing I think that you have to do is make it an environment where people feel comfortable admitting that they made a mistake. Our whole culture is around customer satisfaction, making improvements, and so you want to create an environment where people don’t feel that they’re going to commit career suicide by admitting a mistake.
You have to do that first, and then you have to provide an example of people high up who admit mistakes and learn from it. Talk about it so that people at all levels feel comfortable. If I’m willing to do it, then other people will [be willing] too.
It sounds really simple, but it really has to be a culture from the top down, and it has to be a live-the-values-type thing every day. It can’t be, ‘Oh, this week, I’m going to do this, but in all other parts of my life here, I’m not going to live those values.’ It has to be the values that you show and live every day.
You don’t want to do this if you aren’t prepared to sift through a few failures. You have to be careful that you don’t have a culture of blame because if you start encouraging people to step forward and admit mistakes, and then learn from them and try to make improvements, if you punish people for that, it will never work.
Identify opportunities and work through solutions. Let’s say that somebody is working on a project and either that outcome doesn’t go well, or let’s say somebody is working on the front line and there is a miscommunication and a customer is upset and it escalates.
A supervisor gets information about this issue. So what they would do is have a conversation with that person and ask them, ‘Tell me what happened.’ You want to hear the whole (story). After you listen to them, you continue to ask them questions about, ‘You’ve thought about this. If you had it to do over again, what would you do differently? What could you have done to (make) this better? What preparations could we have made to handle this differently?’
If the person finds something that’s great, they’ll usually say to you, ‘Oh, I should’ve done such and such, and so I already went back to so-and-so, and I said this and this and this and that; now everything is fine.’ And they feel good about it.
If it’s a big enough issue … like an issue that affects a lot of people, we try to get employees to talk about it in their staff meeting. ‘Here’s what happened. Here’s what I did that I should’ve done better. Here’s how I fixed it. Here’s what I learned.’
But let’s say they don’t find anything that they could’ve done better, that it’s just sometimes things happen and you do your best and there isn’t any resolution. We really try hard not to blame people. We have what I would say a learning environment because it helps people grow and take risks. If you put their head on a totem pole, they’re going to keep it down.
