When you hire someone, would you want them to never make any mistakes? If you answered yes, think again! The only way to never make any mistakes is never to do anything, and obsessing with mistake avoidance will push you towards solutions that are likely to be inefficient for most situations. This also likely means avoiding going out of your comfort zone and trying new “risky” stuff which slows down learning.

There are cases where lives or health are at stake and where an obsession with safety and a focus on avoiding mistakes is appropriate (although I would argue that in such cases a balance is needed and, for example, by not trying new “risky” treatment options, we lose the opportunity to save a life). In most cases, however, the growth and learning potential of the staff member is more important.

If we look at “Mistakes” there are those which are deliberate violations of policies and procedures. If someone is caught drunk driving, it is unlikely they did not know it is against the law, but rather chose to do it, thinking they could get away with it. People may also choose to break the rules because they are stupid (and let’s be honest, many are). Such Rule breakers can be wonderful innovators though they are also those who can put people’s lives, or the company’s future at risk. Rule breakers with great judgment know which rules are to be bent and broken and which need to be respected.

There are also many “Mistakes” which are made because of lack of knowledge or attention. Great organizations would have processes to catch most of those before great harm is done and I think it is fantastic when those happen – while the saying goes what one should learn from someone else’s mistake rather than their own, let’s face it we tend to learn a lot faster from our own mistakes. One reason kids learn so fast is they are fearless in making mistakes (and if we’re good parents we’re making it reasonably safe for them).

What differentiates fast and effective learners though is they do not make the same mistakes over and over again, but rather different ones. People who continue making the same mistakes over and over again might lack the capacity to learn, but what is more likely – they just do not care. If someone has high standards for themselves, making a mistake is impactful and creates the change required to avoid making it again.

It might be even better to look at the questions the staff member is asking. If someone is asking no questions, they either have a fantastic ability to figure everything out based on available information, or more likely, an ineffective learner who does not use this wonderful learning tool. Asking experts the expected questions also often leads to discussion and additional deep insights (I already wrote about in this blog post)

Yet the same as with mistakes, you want to see different questions being asked, and if someone is asking the same questions over and over again, they are not making progress.

So when hiring, look for people who will be making different mistakes and asking different questions.

About Author

Peter Zaitsev

Founder, Open-Source Advocate, Technologist, Boards Member, Advisor & Mentor

Peter Zaitsev is an entrepreneur and founder of Underdog Consulting. As one of the foremost experts on Open Source strategy and database optimization, Peter leveraged both his technical vision and entrepreneurial skills to serve as a co-Founder, Board Member & Advisor in a range of open source startups such as Percona, Altinity, FerretDB, etc. Peter is a co-author of High Performance MySQL: Optimization, Backups, and Replication, one of the most popular books on MySQL performance, and the author of hundreds of articles on a variety of topics.

Related posts