Everyone makes mistakes and managers should expect them. After all, mistakes are part of learning. But what happens when someone keeps making the same mistake?
We want workplaces where people feel safe to voice their ideas, learn and sometimes fail. That means giving people room to make mistakes, along with the guidance to learn from them. But it doesn't mean ignoring a pattern.
A healthy workplace culture has to allow for mistakes and expect people to learn from them.
Insight: A mistake becomes a performance issue when the feedback doesn't change the outcome
A manager is responsible for giving clear direction, setting expectations, providing feedback, and then giving people an opportunity to apply the feedback. They are also responsible for putting in the effort to understand why a mistake happened at all.
That said, the circumstances matter. An employee making the same typo three times isn't the same as them repeatedly missing important information in a briefing. And sometimes a repeated mistake might be a sign the direction was vague or the expectations weren’t clear.
That’s why repeating a mistake alone isn’t enough to call it a performance problem. Before deciding someone isn’t applying the feedback, you need to be confident they understood what was expected of them in the first place.
But there has to be a point when a repeated mistake becomes a performance problem. When the expectation and the correct approach are clear, I've always followed a simple rule: the first time is a mistake, the second time reminds us we're human, and the third time is a performance issue.
A mistake becomes a performance issue when someone has been given the knowledge and opportunity to correct it, but the same pattern continues.
Real Leadership Practice: Making my expectations clear
One thing I learned as a manager was that people shouldn’t have to guess how I would respond when they made a mistake.
I wanted the people I managed to know that I expected mistakes. I also wanted them to know that I expected them to learn from them.
So when something went wrong, particularly when it was significant enough to require a conversation, I would often tell them exactly where I drew the line: the first time is a mistake, the second time reminds us we’re human, and the third is a performance issue. It wasn’t a warning or a tally I was keeping. It was a way of making my expectations clear.
We’d talk about what happened, what should have happened instead and why. Then I’d make sure they understood what they needed to do differently the next time.
Looking back, I can see how the formula might have sounded tougher than I intended. But the principle behind it still holds for me. People deserve room to make mistakes. They also deserve to know what their manager expects them to learn from them.
In the Moment: Before you call it a performance issue
When the same problem shows up again, start by looking at what happened between the mistakes.
Ask yourself:
Was I clear about what went wrong and what needed to change?
Did they understand why it mattered?
Did they have the knowledge, ability and resources to do it differently?
Did I give them a reasonable opportunity to apply what they'd learned?
Is this genuinely the same underlying problem, or simply another mistake?
If you can answer yes to the first four questions and you're seeing the same pattern again, the conversation may need to change.
The question is no longer simply, “Did they make another mistake?” It's “Did they learn from the last one?”
The conversation shifts from coaching to accountability. Instead of “let’s figure out what happened,” it becomes “we’ve talked about this before, help me understand why it’s still happening.” You’re no longer just teaching. You’re trying to understand why the learning isn’t showing up in the work.
Question to Sit With This Week:
Where do you draw the line between a mistake and a performance issue?
Got a leadership challenge? Email me at [email protected] and I’ll tackle it in a future issue of The Present Leader.