I appreciate when a leader is willing to admit a mistake — whether that’s entrepreneurs or CEOs who do so in the “My Favorite Mistake” podcast or my book.
So this caught my eye the other day, as reported in many outlets:
Shanahan admits 49ers selecting Lance was a ‘mistake’
As NBC Sports wrote:
“The 49ers traded three first-round picks to move up from the No. 12 overall pick to No. 3 [in the 2021 NFL Draft] and select Lance, which Shanahan, in hindsight, now admits was a mistake.”
The “in hindsight” isn’t completely necessary because we only discover a mistake to be so… in hindsight. By definition.
As I wrote in The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation:
What Are Mistakes?
“Mistakes are actions or judgments that turn out to be misguided or wrong. We believe we are making the right decision at the time, but eventually discover it was wrong, whether seconds or years later. The word “mistake” is a noun. Mistakes exist, whether we recognize and admit them or not. After discovering a mistake, our choices determine if we turn it into something positive (learning and improving) or make things worse (dooming ourselves to repeating them).”
and…
“We can also define a mistake as “an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, assumptions, etc.” That definition also includes common causes of mistakes.”
Shanahan and the 49ers overestimated the impact that Lance could have as a quarterback in the NFL, or at least on their team.
“When you move up and it doesn’t work out, that’s definitely a mistake,” Shanahan said.
Shanahan and the organization had a hypothesis, based on assumptions.
It didn’t work out as well as they expected. So it’s a mistake. In some organizations and industries, leaders can hide or deny a mistake. That’s harder to do in sports. The mistakes tend to be very public.
“If the 49ers could go back in time, while they likely no longer would select Lance, their rationale for pursuing a quarterback at that time still holds up. Unfortunately for Shanahan and the 49ers, they chose the wrong one.”
Why did they make this mistake? The whys include some bad assumptions that Shanahan laid out. The question is whether bad assumptions about a player’s future performance can always be avoided. Or can the team prevent a repeat of the situation where they felt pressured to take a quarterback no matter what?
In the 2022 NFL Draft, they selected another quarterback, Brock Purdy, who exceeded expectations in his first playing time last season.
What will Shanahan and the 49ers do differently as a result of this mistake?
In the short term, they traded Lance to the Dallas Cowboys. That begs the question: Is Jerry Jones making a mistake?
This post got me thinking about two of Tim Clark’s most important points from his book, (1) that psychological safety is rewarded vulnerability and that (2) to foster a culture of psychological safety, leaders need to publicly model admitting mistakes. There is a missing piece of this second point, I believe.
In learning theory, the most important thing is what happens after the behavior. Is it rewarded, punished or ignored? He got it right in the first point that the vulnerable act of admitting a mistake should be rewarded, which will increase the frequency of the behavior.
That brings us to #2, the leader modeling vulnerability by admitting to a mistake. Who, if anyone, rewards or punishes such admissions? If it’s a CEO, presumably he or she is vulnerable to getting fired by the Board. It is unlikely that the Board will reward him or her for doing so. So how is this modeling “rewarded vulnerability”?
Yes, it is unusual for leaders to publicly admit to mistakes, but does the admission alone without them being rewarded encourage their subordinates to similarly take such a chance?
I don’t have a good answer to that other than that the leader’s vulnerability is rewarded to the extent that they don’t get criticized or fired by the Board.
I would be interested in any thoughts that you have on this.
Thanks for your comment and questions, Alan.
Yes, the countermeasures that Clark recommends are to 1) model and 2) reward “vulnerable acts,” which include admitting mistakes.
When leaders model those behaviors (leading by example), I’d agree that it’s *more likely* that employees follow the lead. But employees have to believe they are more likely to be rewarded than be punished. It being relatively safe for the leader to admit a mistake doesn’t automatically mean it will feel safe to the employees.
This is a great point. Even the CEO can be punished or face the risk of professional loss by admitting a mistake. They could be punished by the Board. The CEO’s reputation could suffer. Admitting a mistake is still a “vulnerable act” even for a CEO. The amount of risk they face depends on a number of factors.