Sunday, October 23, 2022

On Maliciousness vs Incompetence, Cont.

With regards to incompetence, it's very hard to address because blaming people tends to make it worse...

Because the reasons people are difficult in the first place tend to be their biases, prejudices - and fears. Focusing on who to blame just tends to make them even more afraid, even more resistant to change, even more determined to hide their weaknesses and cover up their faults, and it just makes it harder.

Zero tolerance makes people more likely to hide their mistakes.

But that leads to a challenge... because how do you make things better if you don't address the root causes? How do you build competence if you don't point out where things could have been handled better? Root causes that often involve people making mistakes?

I'll use an example from a class on how to build a good healthcare organization - a nurse gives a patient the wrong medicine. If the nurse is terrified they'll get fired for making a mistake like that, they would probably try to hide what they did... and the organization doesn't know and can't address it. If the organization focuses on fixing systemic issues without blame, then they may learn about the problem and design a more permanent, systemic solution. Like making sure the medicines have different shapes and colors, so it's harder to give the wrong one on accident. 

This is very challenging, for a couple of reasons. First, people are instinctively afraid of admitting their mistakes no matter how much you tell them that it's okay. You will have to demonstrate, over and over again, that that's what you really want and expect. They have to see you handle other people's mistakes well before they will truly trust what you're saying. 

Second, you do need to address the issue when someone is consistently and repeatedly making mistakes. Like, some things are just human error and can be addressed with systemic issues, but some people are really not suited for certain position. But the issue isn't that they're 'bad' or 'terrible', it's just that some skills/talents/whatever are not a good fit. Anyways, you do need to address a bad mismatch, so you need a structure that doesn't blame people for mistakes but still handles them in such a way that everyone (the person involved, and the organization as a whole) either learns and grows or are moved to positions better suited to them.

All of these things take emotional maturity, good communication skills, empathy, and more. 

When businesses talk about the dearth of good middle managers, it's because far too many are lacking skills like the ones above... which means that most people are working for a direct supervisor who doesn't have the emotional maturity, empathy, or communication skills to develop them the way I just described.

Workers are more likely to have no development at all, to expect to get fired for any mistake, to be poorly paid, and to be treated as though they would malinger and goof off at the slightest chance. 

But I digress. The main point of these last few posts was that learning and growing is the key to competence, that pointing out mistakes has to be handled carefully or you can start the blame game and make everything worse, and that it's easy to say and very challenging to do.

I also wanted to address the 'good shepherd' comment from before. Or rather, go into examples of how refusing to address your own biases/prejudices/fears coupled with a lack of focus on taking care of your people can lead to some pretty godawful decisions that hurt all of us.

Except, ofc, I have to address them in a way that doesn't start the blame game, because it's more about how we can do better in the future than punish people for doing poorly in the past.

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