You've been writing this email for weeks. Constant changes from stakeholders. It's a big campaign for an event going out to some important customers. You've checked and re-checked links and read through the email.
The cursor is hovering over the "Send" button, but you're shaking. Sweat beading on your forehead. Do it. Ok now, do it. Come on.
Finally you hit "Send" because your finger had a spasm that added just enough pressure to make the click.
"It's off," you say to yourself quietly disguised as a sigh.
You look at the email one more time and there at the bottom, in a glaring spotlight is a typo—it's the wrong date for the event!! 😱
Spotlights
Technology has a way of capturing, surfacing, and amplifying our mistakes. What you publish becomes searchable and traceable all the way back to you.
We get called out in comments or your boss checks in on your social media. Work-related publishing can feel like it's all you, because even if the public doesn't know who made the mistake, your manager will know who was in charge of the project.
Managers always know who to blame 😅
The thing about mistakes is that the vast majority of the time, they're blown way out of proportion in our minds due to the spotlight effect. Psych 1010 tells us that we think people are noticing us way more than they actually are. It's a bias, and it's usually wrong.
In my experience, there are a few ways we can overcome the spotlight effect, transform our devastation into something we can handle, and ultimately, get more comfortable making mistakes in public.
'Cause let's be real, on the Internet, someone's always watching...
Two Choices
As a developer, I'm responsible for anything and everything related to website breakdowns. Something looks off in the design or something won't load. The worst, though, is when I do something that breaks a whole page (or the whole site...I mean, that never actually happens...)
I've tried two different approaches.
Hide Everything
Like a kid who breaks something in the house, I've tried simply flying under the radar by discovering bugs and fixing them before anyone notices.
I'm not going to get away with the massive breaks, but on the small, fast stuff, this still kinda works. I am doing my job by monitoring things and randomly checking pages—if I see something, I fix it.
I have always tried to make a record of things I find and fix, but I don't bother telling people about it. If they want to know what I did for 15 minutes on Friday the 13th, they can look it up in the project management software.
Show Everything
This is where we break through the spotlight effect. It's no longer a bias—we're actually going to shine the real spotlight on ourselves.
I had a pretty bad bug a few months ago that took down a page on the website. I immediately started on a fix, but I have to wait for a "deployment" to run for the fix to go live. It takes a couple of hours to push through the whole process, and it's only a couple of minutes of manual work during the time.
While I was waiting, I realized I had a choice. I could try and fly under the radar and risk being called out by someone finally noticing. Or I could get in front of it and be the one that shines the light on it.
It's counter-intuitive to me to expose my mistakes. I don't want to be punished—and there are real risks for doing this, let's be real here.
However, in a healthy work environment, being the one who announces the problem has actually increased the trust others have in me.
The Framework
When you shine the light on a problem, you need to do the following:
- Describe the problem. The products page is showing a 500 error.
- Describe the cause. This was related to the new feature we added to the solution page, but it had a typo in the connection.
- How long was this a problem? I found this at 1 PM today, so it's only been about 20 minutes.
- What are you already doing about the problem? I have a fix that is on track to go live in 75 minutes.
- Describe any next steps. I'll let you know as soon as the deployment finishes and the page is back up.
- Is there anything else you need to solve the problem? If you can keep the marketing team from sending the email update until after the page is back up, I'd appreciate that.
This framework keeps things short, provides clear information about what happened, where we are currently, and what's next. These are the questions anyone will have when they hear there is a problem.
Pro Tip: If you're the kind of person that likes to hit Send for each line of a message in a chat program, don't do that here. You don't want to send a single line saying, "This page is broken." Send it all at once—the problem, the fix, the plan. This reduces anxiety for your coworkers.
What I love about this framework is that "I'm so sorry" is not found anywhere in the message. Crunch time is not the time for apologies and self-deprecation. Instead this shows that you are in control and you are leading out on fixing a problem.
That's not to say that apologizing is bad. I just tend to over-apologize and that prevents me from making progress when I really need to focus.
Speaking of apologizing...
Transparency Increases Trust
There is one more counter-intuitive thing that companies especially struggle with.
Public apologies are tough. They feel embarrassing, they feel awkward, they shine that white-hot spotlight on something you'd prefer stayed hidden.
Companies hate apologizing. People think that apologizing shows weakness, so decision-makers in business tend not apologize.
However, there are examples of brands owning up to their mistakes and it ends up increasing trust in the brand. (I'm thinking about Toyota in the early 2000's, Netflix, and others)
Anecdotally, I just can't trust a person, a politician, a company, an organization that refuses to apologize when they've made a mistake.
The hardest part is being seen, mistakes and all. It's risky, it's painful, but it's almost always better to own the mistakes. We can't remove mistakes, so we may as well aim for removing as much shame as possible instead.