Page 81 - Harnessing the Strengths

64 ■ Servant-Leadership in the Intercultural Practice

Fatal Error Versus Chance to Improve

Dealing with mistakes is territory where servant- leadership
is especially visible. A process controller at Motorola once
tried to improve the cleaning process of the electrical cir-
cuits of GSMs. Because he used brushes that were too
sharp, he not only cleaned more of the debris away but also
cut through important circuits. The result was more than a
hundred thousand dollars in damage. When he was invited
to CEO Bob Galvin’s offi ce, he prepared himself to be fi red.
To his surprise, Bob Galvin asked him to write a report
about how they could permanently avoid similar mistakes
in the future. After reading the report, Galvin announced
that the employee and his analysis were responsible for a
new cleaning approach that saved the organization more
than a million dollars.
After a hundred-thousand-dollar mistake like that,
most CEOs would have fi red the employee on the spot.
Not Bob Galvin; he illustrated an important principle of
servant-leadership: the view that mistakes are chances
for improvement. Leadership is only effective if you cre-
ate an error-correcting system that continually learns from
unusual mistakes. In the long term, there is nothing more
deadly than a perfect system, a wedding without disagree-
ments, or a car without defects. You can only judge the ser-
vice of a car the moment that there is a defect. Of course, the
defect should remain an exception, but the reaction to the
special situation opens a world of possibilities for the auto
dealer to differentiate itself from the competition.
The servant-leader will always try to view the mistakes
of others as chances to learn and grow. That is why he or
she asks the useful questions: What can we learn from this
mistake? What can we do next time to make sure it does