HARD goals are called HARD goals for a good reason. They should challenge even your best people to reach beyond what’s tried and tested and comfortable; in other words, the status quo. And, like any tough challenge, sometimes before success is reached, folks make mistakes, freeze up, doubt their abilities or shy away from accountability.
When it comes to HARD goals, errors are inevitable and to be expected, but critical errors left uncorrected are unacceptable. Mistakes left unaddressed are likely to be repeated. This translates to heavy frustration on your part and unnecessary performance limitations on the part of your employees. Both of which have no place in a Hundred Percenter workplace.
When mistakes happen, there are typically four ways the situation can go:
- The mistake is never discussed, or the employee is gently reprimanded, neither approach makes any impact whatsoever and the mistake is soon repeated. (The Appeaser)
- The employee is scolded unreasonably hard and thus becomes less concerned with improvement and more concerned with vengeance which creates additional performance problems. (The Intimidator)
- The mistake is ignored, often with the hope that it will fix itself. (The Avoider).
- The employee is called on the error and then guided on what can be done to correct and prevent it from happening again; thus inspiring a desire to make a change that results in Hundred Percenter performance. (The 100% Leader)
100 % Leaders aren’t afraid to constructively critique employee performance when warranted. But, they understand there’s a fine balance between making corrections that do nothing, corrections that push good employees to Hundred Percenter performance, and corrections that push good employees to either stop trying or send them barreling out the door. No one welcomes a humiliating scolding or a correction that is no more than a harsh analysis of the problem. It makes most people defensive, and once the walls of defensiveness spring up, chances of willing improvement drop into the negative digits.
You may want to say, “Tim, this HARD goal requires strict attention to detail and your organizational skills are notoriously lousy. If you don’t clean up your act, the whole team will suffer because of it.” It may be the truth, and probably you and everyone who has known Tim since the first grade knows it, but it won’t get Hundred Percenter results. You might hurt Tim’s feelings and push him to get his act together–temporarily. But, he’s probably cursing you under his breath for your insensitive approach and plotting all the ways he can get back at you for publicly making him look like an idiot.
It’s just as ineffective to use any of the popular softening “tricks” such as “criticize the action, not the person”, or “layer the constructive feedback with praise to make it sound kinder and gentler.” These techniques don’t work and they have a tendency to backfire and produce the opposite results of what you want.
Bottom line, when good people mess up, they get it, and they feel bad about it. They’re not racing down the halls, kicking up their heels, and shouting, “Whoopee! I gave our best client misinformation and he pulled his account!” And if they are, well, you’ve got a whole different set of problems on your hands.
When good employees make mistakes, whether they are executing HARD goals or going about their day-to-day performance, they usually have an awareness that things didn’t go right. It may be conscious or subconscious, but in most cases, they know that on some level they messed up. (Getting people to come to terms with an error and admit it outright may be a bit more psychologically involved, but we’ll get to that in a minute). The thing to remember is that chances are really good that your best people, when they mess up, have already spent some time sweating out their feelings of lousy self worth and the repercussions they may face for having made the mistake. So they don’t need you to make them feel any worse; they are already doing a really good job of that on their own.
Ultimately, your good performers; your Hundred Percenters, and those with potential to be the same, want to move forward from the mistake and redeem themselves. What they do need from you is some guidance on why the error happened, how to correct it, and how to keep it from happening again. And through it all, they want to be treated with respect. After all, these folks have a history of good or promising performance. And mistake or no mistake, that does count for something.



