Dealing with Mistakes

One morning in December, Earl Wright was a man with a toilet problem. Namely, none of the toilets in the Treasury Annex, a building with 200 workers, was working. The night before, a maintenance worker had sent a motorized cleaning tube known as a snake into the building's central plumbing pipe. The snake got stuck. By 6 a.m., it was still stuck. So when Treasury Annex employees got to work, they had an e-mail waiting for them: Don't use the toilets.

The problem was fixed a few hours later, but it is the kind of situation Wright wants to avoid in the future. As chief of management and administrative programs, it's his job to make sure such things don't happen. But he didn't yell at the maintenance workers or threaten to fire anyone. Part of his effort to build trust among his employees is to deal with them professionally, even when they make regrettable mistakes. Wright planned to talk with the maintenance workers to figure out how to prevent a toilet shutdown again, not to place blame. "It's important to get people around a table and talk about what worked well and what didn't work well," says Wright's deputy, Traci Allen. "We need to acknowledge problem areas. In the past, failures and problems were swept under the rug."

Another, more serious incident took place earlier in 2002, when mailroom workers let a letter that hadn't been treated for anthrax into the Treasury building. The letter was not contaminated, but no letters were supposed to get into the building without first being treated. So Wright disciplined the workers responsible for the mistake.

In the process of doing so, however, Wright learned that the mailroom workers felt like some of their basic work needs were being neglected. Now Wright has a biweekly meeting with the mailroom staff to address their concerns. "You need to make straight talk common," he says.