Something is going to go wrong.
A job will be produced incorrectly. A salesperson will promise something production cannot realistically deliver. A deadline will get missed. A customer will hear one thing while your team hears another. Somebody will order the wrong material. A new employee will make a decision that a 25-year veteran would never make.
Or maybe your company will try a new workflow, piece of technology, marketing idea, or AI tool, and it simply will not work the way everyone expected.
That is business.
The more important question is what happens next.
Because what happens after the mistake tells you a lot about the leadership and culture of an organization.
Think about your own company. When something goes wrong, what is the first reaction? Is it, “Who did this?” or “Why didn’t somebody tell me?”
Or does somebody slow things down long enough to ask, “What happened? What did we miss? And what needs to change so this is less likely to happen again?”
Those may sound like small differences. They aren’t.
People Learn What Is Safe
I have spent enough time around organizations to know that people figure out the real rules pretty quickly. Not the rules in the employee handbook. The real rules.
Read this full article on Printing Impressions, a publication of PRINTING United Alliance, ASI’s strategic partner.
