When Good People Do Bad Things

Part of good management is to build a culture where people are rewarded for doing good things and steered away from doing bad things. Should someone go wrong, then they should not be punished, although it's important that they are clear about how they have gone wrong and how to put it right. It's not always so cut and dry, but when there's room for ambiguity, that's when there should be a partnership of management and worker to find out the best solution.

All problems that are left will fester. So don't leave problems. Also don't leave people on their own with nobody keeping them in the loop. If something has been mentioned, follow it up. The more junior the member of staff, the more important it is to keep them in the loop.

New ideas are important too, if you want to thrive then you should stay abreast of the latest developments. Perhaps you should put time into retraining or evaluating new ideas. This time is simply not available if you work at over 80% capacity. If you work at 100% capacity then you'd think that you deliver more, but the pressure of doing that will slow you down in the medium term and stop you in the long term... so don't.

Don't half-start improvements and drop them the moment something difficult happens. Don't give people license to investigate something, get conclusions from them and then stop them from finishing the job. Don't fall into the trap of assuming that any new tool has to be slowed down by having all the old work ported across to it. You can be the enemy of progress.

It's quite natural, after a few years of getting things wrong for people to become tired of fighting, or become so incensed that nothing ever happens that they take the law into their own hands. Your polarised workforce is then composed of revolutionaries and stick-in-the-mud types. There will be blood.