Tag Archive for: Errors

This article was originally published in the newspaper “La Estrella” and is part of a biweekly column from the ICF Panama Chapter to disseminate what Professional Coaching is. It seeks to inform, create more awareness and differentiate professional coaching, in which the Coach is governed by ethical principles and is continually improving his or her skills.

See the original article in this link.

The concept of Psychological Safety popularized by Amy C. Edmondson, a professor at Harvard University in her book Teaming, refers to the belief shared by members of a work team that, within the team, there is a safe environment to take risks and admit mistakes.  Not to say that there should be no consequences for errors, but that errors can be admitted in an environment of psychological safety and at the same time comply with the organisation’s standards and controls. This is the way we can truly learn from our mistakes, find the root cause and creatively focus on solutions.

The responsibility for creating this feeling of psychological security in work teams falls mainly on the leaders of the organisations.

Through team coaching we can work with organisational leaders and their teams to raise awareness of the existing level of psychological safety and implement actions for its development. Team coaching can help facilitate spaces for conversation and feedback, develop trust in teams through observation and intervention methodologies that promote self-awareness, release of tension, critical self-assessment of performance, and recognition of worth, among others.

We can also support leaders to deploy their competencies as leaders who coach, through active listening and direct communication, a creative approach to visualizing options, developing solutions and integrating lessons learned.

In his 2011 article, Strategies to Learn from Failure, Dr. Edmondson, talks about creating an organisational culture where mistakes are seen as a source of learning, encouraging teams to detect, analyse and even experiment to learn from their mistakes.  A leader at a technology company said: “We are in the discovery business, and the faster we fail, the faster we succeed.”

In this sense, in the aforementioned article, we talk about “The Spectrum of Reasons for Failure”:

Reasons with the greatest reason for Individual Responsibility:

• Deviation: An individual CHOOSES to violate a prescribed process or procedure.
• Inattention: An individual INADVERTENTLY deviates from existing specifications.

Reasons with some Individual Responsibility:

• Lack of Skill: An individual DOES NOT HAVE the skills, conditions or training to perform a task.
• Inadequate Process: A competent individual adheres to a prescribed process that is INADEQUATE.
• Challenging Task: An individual is faced with a task TOO DIFFICULT to be performed reliably every time.

Reasons with little or no Individual Responsibility:

• Process Complexity: A process composed of many elements suffers BREAKS when it finds new interactions with other elements.
• Uncertainty: Lack of clarity about future events causes people to take APPARENTLY REASONABLE actions that produce undesired results.
• Testing Hypotheses: An experiment to prove that an idea or design is successful fails.
• Exploratory Testing: An experiment conducted to expand knowledge and investigate a possibility leads to an undesired result.

It is important to emphasise that this is a spectrum and there is no clear and defined border between each of these reasons. The idea is not to find guilty people, but to explore the reasons for the failure. Having knowledge of this spectrum helps to more consciously explore the root cause, find appropriate solutions and implement them in an organisational development process.

The leader can apply coaching competencies in a conversation of exploration and creative reflection between leader and collaborator, using open questions that explore the personal or systematic causes of failure, in an environment of psychological safety in which the focus is on integrating learning, promoting the development of people and processes and finding solutions that create value and sustainable results for all Stakeholders. Team coaching can support organisations in creating a culture of learning and responsibility.

Authors:

Alberto Navarro, He is an Executive Coach and Team Coach, credentialed as a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) by ICF. Vice President of the Board of Directors of ICF Panama Chapter.

Fátima Ribeiro, He is a Coach in professional development, leadership and team processes, credentialed as an Associated Certified Coach (ACC) by ICF. Member of the Board of Directors of ICF Panama Chapter.