Inspiring Leaders

The best indicator of how well an organization will help you grow is how its leaders deal with mistakes and failure.

In my first project at my current organization, we used an open-source CMS to handle content. In the long run, we had to fix issues dealing with eventual consistency. My then tech lead, Sneha Vasanth, started working on one such issue and came up with an approach to fix it.

After fixing the issue, she called me (the only other senior dev available) to explain her solution. I asked her how the solution would work in a specific scenario and she realised that it wouldn't. She then started working on an alternate solution.

The next day in our standup, she called out that she had made a mistake and it would take more time to fix it. She then appreciated me for finding out the flaw and followed it up with setting up a meeting with the other devs so that they would not make similar mistakes.

This act, of owning up to your mistake in front of everyone, set the bar in the team for how mistakes and failures would be addressed. In the days that followed, I saw everyone else in the team doing the same. With the fear of failure now diminished, people became more open to experimenting, trying out new solutions and learning from others' mistakes. A by-product of that was productivity and learning going up through the roof.

I've been part of multiple teams since then and have learnt a lot but this lesson is something that I keep close to my heart.