Making It Safe to Admit Mistakes at Work Might Start With Thank You
I've been rereading Takehiko Harada's book Management Lessons from Taiichi Ohno. Harada joined Toyota Motor Corporation in 1968 and spent about four decades there, including time as project general manager of the Operations Management Consulting Division, the group Toyota used to spread TPS inside and outside the company.
There's a short section near the end about how to make it safe to admit mistakes at work. The advice is more practical than most of what gets written on the subject.
He opens with a claim I'd push back on. Harada writes that Japan is “probably the only country” where a person who makes a mistake will say he messed up and that it's his responsibility. In other countries, he says, workers aren't as respected, a mistake can cost you your job, and so people hide their own errors and cover for their friends.
I don't think that holds up as stated, on a national level.
I've worked with American hospitals and other organizations where people own mistakes openly, usually because a manager made that feel safe to do over a long period of time. Harada also undercuts his own claim a page later, when he describes Japanese managers who evaluate people badly for making mistakes and notes that this happens quite frequently in Japan.
The country comparison isn't the useful part. What he recommends once he acknowledges the problem exists in Japan, too, is the part I'd hand to a leadership team.
The manager who punishes to protect the rules
Harada describes a specific manager mindset. Somebody makes a mistake, and the manager concludes that he has to punish the person, or else, in the book's translated wording, “I cannot keep the integrity of our rules.”
I want to be fair to that manager, because it's not a stupid position. If a rule is real and nothing happens when it gets broken, the rule starts to look optional. That's a legitimate worry.
The trouble is what the punishment teaches everyone else.
Harada's word for the result is destructive: it puts up walls between people, and hurts performance overall.
He connects this directly to the production system. One way to understand TPS, he writes, is as “abnormality management.” You have to see problems while they're happening, in real time. Guessing at root causes and countermeasures won't get you there.
So if people can't admit mistakes without being hurt for it, Harada says, TPS won't take root.
That's a stronger statement than “culture matters.” He's saying the method depends on the reporting, and the reporting depends on what happens to the reporter.
Recurrence prevention is easier to teach than “I'm sorry”
This is where I think the argument earns its keep.
Harada admits that building a culture where people can say “I'm sorry” is very difficult. He also says that difficulty is not a reason to stop identifying problems, stop doing root cause analysis, or stop fixing things, because that's not an option we have.
So his suggestion is to stop caring about the apology.
Tell people they don't have to apologize, but they do have to do recurrence prevention so the same problem doesn't happen again.
That moves the ask from how somebody feels to a piece of work somebody does. You can't require someone to feel safe. You can require a team to investigate a problem and prevent it from happening again.
Then he makes an observation about job design that I'd underline.
In many companies, the worker's job, the manager's job, and the support staff's job are all well defined. When a defect occurs, there's a person whose job it is to fix that defect. She fixes it the standard way, and the problem is considered closed.
It's less common for the job description to include making sure it doesn't come back.
I see this constantly in hospitals. The nurse can't find the supply she needs, so she walks to another unit and borrows one. The tech catches the wrong-strength vial and swaps it out.
Today's patient is fine. That's a real save.
But tomorrow's system looks exactly like today's, and the person who made the save is usually too busy to prevent the next one by improving the system.
Harada would call the defect fixed and the problem untouched.
He's honest that “recurrence prevention” isn't a phrase people use much outside Japan, and that getting the concept understood takes time. Still, he thinks it can take root more easily than “I'm sorry.”
That matches what I've seen. A team can work on recurrence prevention this week. They can only decide whether it's safe to admit mistakes by watching what you do.
Start by saying thank you
His practical advice is almost easy to miss.
In your weekly management meetings, you're going to get reports on operations. When one of your managers really gets into a root cause and does recurrence prevention, say thank you for it, out loud, and name the thing you're thanking them for.
Harada's example: “Thank you so much for doing such a good job on recurrence prevention.”
He thinks the thank you comes first, and that more frequent “I'm sorry” admissions follow from it.
The ordering is what I keep noticing.
Most of the advice in this space runs the other way. Build psychological safety, then people will report problems, then you can improve.
Harada is suggesting a different starting point: reward the behavior you want in a meeting that's already on the calendar. Do it in front of the people whose behavior you're trying to change.
It only works if the thank you is real, of course. If a leader thanks somebody on Tuesday and the same incident turns up in that person's performance review in November, everybody will figure it out.
And they'll tell each other.
The thank you isn't a technique. People will watch what happens next, and they'll need to see the same response more than once before they trust it.
A Toyota manager who actually said thank you
I told a version of this story in The Mistakes That Make Us.
Isao Yoshino joined Toyota in 1966, straight out of university. Part of his orientation put him in a paint shop, where his job included adding paint and solvent to a mixing machine every few hours.
During his first week, the paint stopped sticking properly to body panels. At least 100 cars had to be repainted.
Yoshino found out when a group came into the paint shop shouting about the problem, and he remembers feeling sick and assuming he had done something wrong.
His managers asked him to show them how he poured the cans into the tank.
He had used the wrong solvent.
The cans looked identical, and the correct solvent had no defined storage location.
His managers thanked him for making the mistake. They told him it was management's mistake for not setting up a new person to succeed, and they changed the process so it couldn't happen again.
Yoshino later said, “You cannot get anything out of blaming somebody,” and built a 40-year career around that.
Notice that Yoshino never apologized his way into that outcome. He didn't know he'd made a mistake until somebody else found the defect.
What made the experience stick with him for four decades was how his managers responded.
Harada's ordering fits that.
Thank you first. “I'm sorry” comes later, if it comes at all, and maybe it doesn't matter much whether it does.
You don't have to begin by convincing people that it's safe to admit mistakes. You can begin by changing what happens when somebody brings a problem into the room.
So when somebody in your next management meeting reports a problem, what does your organization reward — getting today's problem out of the way, or doing the work to keep it from coming back?
