By Dr Farah Sleiman

Albert Einstein once said :”A person who never made a mistake, never tried anything new” and this is a crucial idea to understand in the world of entrepreneurship and the lifecycle of startups. As your innovation rate accelerates, your mistake rate will shoot up exponentially and your capability to reach the golden product/market fit first and scale up thereafter will depend fundamentally on how you as a CEO and leader handle mistakes in the heart of your organization, whether you learn from them and how you institutionalize this learning on an organizational level .The crucial question to ask yourself here is :Is your organization and team emerging wiser, more knowledgeable or better organized after each mistake or you are leaving a wake of resentment and bitterness after each error by applying a “let’s find who to hang” policy or shrugging the whole thing under the rug and pretending nothing happened? Employees mistakes are not born equal and thus handling them doesn’t follow a one-recipe-fits-it-all formula.How you handle a mistake depends fundamentally on its root cause and different root causes require different remedies.

Employees mistakes take origin in one or a combination of three possible reasons: 

• A gap in process 
• A gap in skills
• A gap in values 

Based on my experience working with startups, at least 80% of employees’ mistakes are due to a gap in process and here under process we include management brief, work methodology, resources and tools made available to the employee to perform his assigned task and process design which is the sequence of steps that needs to be followed to produce an outcome or deliverable. Having a sound process is an essential step to be able to scale up and this is a step that is often overlooked and undervalued in startups , you simply cannot reach product/market fit if your process is not sound, because simply your process determines the quality of all the outputs generated by your organization whether it is services, products, customer experience or internal operations. Quality of output at all levels in your organization is based on the quality of your processes. So a messy process equals low quality output at all levels, simply put, junk in junk out.

The second most common cause of mistakes employees make is a gap in their skills. If you have established the right organizational culture in your company whereby everyone is striving for excellence and doing his best, it follows that the performance of your employees and the quality of their deliverables should reflect the level of their competency and knowhow in the domain required from their role. Here it is important to point out that if you have a dysfunctional process, even the most highly skilled employees will perform poorly and in this situation you cannot assess objectively anyone’s skill level. But let us assume you got your process right, the second step would be to verify if you got the right man for the right job. Here many CEOs of startups confuse their own expectations of the employee’s skillset level with the employee actual competencies. I call this “CEO myopia”. Just because an employee has graduated with a degree in software engineering it does not automatically mean that he has the skillset needed to fulfill the role of a CTO and excel in it. The only way to find out is to have a thorough skill analysis exercise in the recruitment process and see whether this fits with the competencies required for the role to be assigned to the employee. Many startups CEO fall into the trap of matching university degrees with job titles, this is a big mistake , you need to match skillsets and previous responsibilities on past jobs with required competencies on this job. Having a university degree in a certain field doesn’t not automatically mean you have the skills for this field, you need to have practiced this theoretical know-how and put it to work not memorized the governing principles from some textbook. Theory creates awareness, but only practice creates skills. That is why proper employee placement require a thorough job role analysis and not simply matching degrees with job titles, otherwise it will take you 6 months down the road to discover that your employee doesn’t have the right skills for the job assigned to him. And this is a very costly way to find out that your recruitment process has failed. Because usually employees who are overwhelmed by a job that is over their skillset try to hide their mistakes very fiercely to avoid being sacked and the truth will only come out after they would have made such a big mess that no one can hide it anymore. The third cause of mistakes and usually this constitutes only 5% of all causes of mistakes is a gap in values, in another word here the mistake is due to sloppiness .This usually reflects a deeper organizational problem , a gap in the organizational culture. And this is something that is directly related to the CEO himself and it stems from the golden rule:”You get what you tolerate”. If you as a CEO tolerate mediocre work and behavior and there are no consequences for delivering such low-quality outcomes and deliverables, then you are going to get sloppy employees who deliver mediocre work with no attention to details and full of mistakes. Complacence breeds mediocrity and mediocrity is the cemetery of all startups because once embedded in the organizational culture it is a cancer that kills innovation, quality, performance and all growth outlooks. You tolerate one mediocre employee soon all your employees will lower their performance level to his level, and you end up with a mediocre full house. Thus, in the end of this article, my message to startups CEOs is the following whenever you are encountered with mistakes from your employees your first move should be to analyze the root cause and ask yourself : ”What is it you are doing or not doing that could have led to this”? Only then you can decide on which corrective measure will be adequate. If you have ruled out process failure and skill gap and you are faced with a gap in values this is where you have to hit with an iron fist, there should be no concessions on values, everything else is fixable but values should be a red line.