I’m Amanda Studebaker, and I’m currently a Service Delivery Technical Manager at Baker Hughes, living in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

In my current role, I lead a team of about 40 cross-functional engineers, spread across 6 countries. Working as a people leader for the first time has given me the opportunity to reflect on what values I think are crucial to a team, and today I want to talk about one that I think is especially important, which is responding to failures.

When I started my career, I went on what we call a “breakout job,” which is your first time to be the lead engineer at a field site and calling the shots. Now, the job went terribly. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong. Most of the problems we solved quickly, but one of the problems compounded and a decision I made directly caused downtime for our customer, which one of the worst things you can do as a field engineer. I got the problem fixed, sorted it out with the customer, and then all that was left to do was call my boss…which is what I was really dreading the most, as this was the first time I had really messed up at work and I was afraid I had let him down.

When I told my boss what happened, he was silent for a moment, and then just asked two questions. One; “Did you learn from it?” and two;  “What will you do differently next time?” and then he moved on. I hung up the phone. I was quite shocked, as I had been beating myself up all morning and was prepared for a long lecture from him, which never ended up happening.

A few years later, as I was preparing to move into my current role, which would put me in charge of a large team, I emailed this same old boss for some advice.

Out of many things that he wrote me, one message stood out, and it was something like this: He said, “Some people won’t care too much when they mess up. Your job is going to be to make them care more. Other people are going to beat themselves up when they mess up. Your job will then be to build them back up. Make sure that you are taking the time to figure out which one you need to do.”

As I read this, memories of my mistake in the field came rushing back, and suddenly his response to me back then made a lot more sense.

I share this story because I believe that a major key to a high-performing team is that everyone takes ownership for their results, and this can only be achieved if people are not terrified to make mistakes. I tell my team, if you make a mistake and you own up to it and have a plan to not do it again, then we can overcome it and this is how we get better. On the other hand, if you cover it up, or even worse, if you are found pointing the finger at someone else, then we are going to have a major problem. To create a strong culture, it requires that every single person on the team treat mistakes as steps towards improving, instead of something to be avoided at all costs.

Thank you, Ms. Studebaker, for sharing this personal story.

Listening to this insightful reflection, I was impressed by the profound lesson that shines through. That is, owning up to what you do is important not just to you personally, but to the entire team you are working with.
From my own team experiences as a student, I can add that taking responsibility for your actions is not just beneficial to the performance of a team, but creates the most ideal circumstances for everyone’s creativity to blossom. The calm and constructive response that she received from her boss after owning up to a mistake is an example of how we all wish to be treated by someone in a leadership position.
It also goes to show how often we humans have the tendency to beat ourselves up over things, but when we look back, we see that we were looking at it from the wrong perspective, and that a different perspective can soothe us.
As an aspiring engineer myself, it is valuable advice to not be afraid of mistakes. Instead, we should view mistakes as an opportunity to learn. And perhaps the biggest mistake one can make is to not realize that every mistake is an opportunity to grow.