The 5th and final rule of Defensive Driving speaks to the idea that moving forward is safer than going backwards. If you ever see a parked telephone company van, power company vehicle, fire truck or police car you will rarely see them situated where they will have to back up when leaving their current parking place. The reason for this is that they spend a lot of time training their drivers to be proactive in avoiding accidents and one of the most proactive things one can do in that regard is to keep from having to back up.
To be sure, both in driving and in leadership, there are very necessary times to take a step backward. We all make mistakes or follow through on decisions that do not turn out as we had planned. In those instances it would be foolish to plow forward. When those situations arise, however, we want to make sure that we take notice and not put ourselves in that situation again.
An old Chinese proverb states, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” In the area of leadership I think we should add, “Fool me three times and I’ll be looking for another job.” I am overstating the point, of course, but I believe the burden falls on the leader when his team continues to have to back up because of repeating the same mistakes.
One of the answers to combating the problem of repeated mistakes is simply to own the ones we do make. We shouldn’t try to avoid them or conceal them from our team. We need to put them under the light of inspection and try to figure out what happened. As this process is worked through everyone on the team has an understanding of what to do when that situation arises again.
I don’t believe it is healthy to lead in a way that causes my team to fear mistakes. I desire to create an atmosphere where mistakes are an ok thing when they happen after proper planning and calculated risks. That being said, I would be negligent if I allowed our team to continue to do the same thing over and over again when it isn’t working (isn’t that the definition of insanity?).
