Your team will make mistakes the minute you tell them to move. What you do next decides your culture.

We are not judged by our mistakes. We're judged by how quickly we fix them and whether we repeat them. In episode 136, I break down WE 5 from Kyle McDowell's Begin With We: we own our mistakes.

Last week was about getting your team to take action. This week is what comes right after. Punish the mistake and the movement stops. Make people hide it and trust dies.

McDowell tells the Ford story. Every week, every executive status report came in green while the company lost billions. Alan Mulally said: red, yellow or green, I just want the truth. Mark Fields finally showed the first red. Instead of getting hammered, he got help. A few weeks later the reports looked like a bag full of Skittles.

Fields later became CEO of Ford.

In this episode:
- Resiliency: how quickly you get back to your baseline
- Why this show is called DeadThree, and what happens to your best shooter when you pull him after one miss
- Shout praise, whisper criticism
- The program review where every team hit 30 or 40% and everyone clapped
- The day I deleted every shoe on shoes.com, and why I still remember how my boss Keith made me feel
- McDowell's three kinds of mistakes: careless, malice and good faith. Most leaders respond to all three the same way.
- If you treat a good-faith mistake like malice, you'll never see initiative from that person again
- Four sentences of ownership, and why your team can't fix a problem they don't know exists

Your move this week:
1. Show your team a red. One thing you got wrong or one thing that isn't going well. Say it out loud: here's why and how it happened, here's how and when we fix it, here's what we do so it doesn't happen again.
2. The next time something breaks, catch yourself before you ask who. Ask what happened. Then ask why five times.

"You need to be tough on the problem, but you need to be easy on the person." — Kyle McDowell

Chapters
00:00 WE 5 of the Begin With We series
00:58 "It's a WE thing"
06:46 WE 5: we own our mistakes
07:07 Resiliency and your baseline
09:57 Recap: WE 1 through WE 4
10:38 Your team moves, your team makes mistakes
12:46 Punish the mistake and the movement stops
13:57 Why it's called DeadThree
17:13 Shout praise, whisper criticism
19:12 Dare to fail greatly
20:59 Everything is green
24:19 Ford: red, yellow or green
27:24 Mark Fields shows the first red
27:49 Assess it, own it, fix it, don't repeat it
28:39 The day I deleted shoes.com
30:30 Talking to one, coaching all
34:11 Three kinds of mistakes
35:47 Good faith treated like malice
37:34 Four sentences of ownership
40:25 Two actions for this week
41:35 Tough on the problem, easy on the person
43:02 Stack it up, and a look at WE 6

Mentioned in this episode:
- Begin With We by Kyle McDowell
- Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
- The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni
- Multipliers by Liz Wiseman
- The 4 Disciplines of Execution
- Robert F. Kennedy, Alan Mulally, Mark Fields, Don Meyer and John Wooden

This is WE 5 of 10 in the Begin With We series. Catch up with episode 132 (The One Standard That Holds Up Every Other Standard), episode 133 (Who Sets the Temperature on Your Team?), episode 134 (Built or Destroyed One Commitment at a Time) and episode 135 (We Take Action).

If this one hit, send it to the leader on your team who still asks "who did this?" first.

Find out where your team stands. Take the free 30-question SDE assessment and download the SDE Playbook at https://deadthreecoaching.com/sde-assessment