I gave the wrong order: responsibility begins where the excuses of authority end

The order took only a few seconds.

Its consequences could take a whole shift to correct.

A process was running late. Pressure was rising. The manager had several alternatives in front of him, but none looked perfect. A decision had to be taken and the time for discussion was running out.

“Carry on like this. I take the responsibility.”

The employees obeyed.

Later it turned out the decision had been wrong. The information had not been properly assessed. A warning had been bypassed. What was meant to be a quick solution had created extra work.

At the morning meeting, the manager had two options.

He could explain that the situation had been difficult, that time was limited and that the employees should have shown more care in carrying it out.

Or he could say a much shorter sentence.

“I gave the wrong order.”

Five words.

And a whole battle with himself.

There is a special power in the person who gives orders.

He can change the direction of work with one sentence. He can set priorities, distribute responsibilities and demand action even when others do not fully agree.

This power is necessary.

An organisation cannot stop before every decision, waiting until everyone holds the same opinion. There are situations where someone must take responsibility for choosing between imperfect alternatives.

But authority carries a risk that is not usually written in the job description.

It can teach a person to live ever further from the consequences of his own decisions.

The manager gives the instruction.

The employee carries it out.

If everything goes well, the decision can be presented as proof of successful leadership.

If something goes wrong, attention often shifts to how it was carried out.

Was the procedure followed?

Was the employee careful enough?

Should he have asked for another clarification?

These are legitimate questions. A right order can be carried out wrongly. An employee has professional responsibility and is not freed from it just because he received an instruction.

But there is another question too.

A question that some managers avoid with almost perfect skill.

Was the order itself wrong?

It is strange how easily we can examine someone else's mistake and how much effort it takes to examine our own.

When an employee makes a mistake, we look for the cause.

When a manager does, we often look for the circumstances.

The employee was not careful.

The manager was under pressure.

The employee did not understand the process.

The manager did not have enough information.

The employee took a hasty decision.

The manager had to act fast.

It is not that the second explanations are necessarily untrue. Pressure exists. Information may be incomplete. Decisions have to be taken even in conditions of uncertainty.

But these circumstances exist for people without leadership titles too.

The difference is that one often has to explain his mistake to someone else, while the other may have the privilege of writing his own explanation himself.

And this privilege, if not checked by conscience, can become one of the greatest enemies of professional judgement.

Because the person who controls how a mistake is told may be tempted to change the story before he understands what happened.

Yet a bad result does not automatically prove that the decision was wrong.

This distinction is essential.

A manager can take a reasonable decision, based on the information available, respect the limits of safety and still face an unwanted result.

No decision-making eliminates uncertainty completely.

If every negative result is treated as proof of the incompetence of whoever decided, the organisation will begin to fear every decision.

People will ask for endless approvals, avoid initiative and try not to be the person who signs.

Responsibility does not demand that a manager control everything that happens.

It demands that he be able to explain the reasoning behind his decision.

What did he know at that moment?

What did he not know?

Which alternatives had he considered?

Which risks had he accepted?

Had he respected the limits of authority and safety?

And, perhaps most important, had he ignored a warning just because it came from someone with less power?

The answers to these questions can show that a decision was reasonable, whatever the result.

But they can also reveal something much harder to accept.

That the problem was not a lack of information.

It was the refusal to listen.

There is a moment in the relationship between manager and employee that says a lot about the character of an organisation.

It is the instant when the employee says:

“I don't think this will work.”

This sentence may be an unfounded objection. It may come from fear of change, lack of experience or an incomplete understanding of the situation.

But it may also be the most valuable warning the manager will get that day.

A person who works with a process every day may know weaknesses that do not appear in presentations.

He may know that a skipped step creates problems later.

He may have seen the same decision fail before.

And he may be trying to protect the organisation from a mistake the manager has not noticed.

But authority finds it easy to confuse objection with disrespect.

Especially when the decision has already been announced.

Because after that moment, changing your mind may look like losing control.

And some managers find it easier to accept an operational risk than to admit publicly that an employee may have understood the situation better.

Here pride begins to cost.

Not because the person has self-confidence.

But because he has begun to defend his own image even when a reason to review the decision stands in front of him.

I am particularly troubled by one kind of sentence often heard in workplaces where authority is stronger than responsibility.

“I told you what to do. How you did it is your problem.”

Sometimes this may be right.

A manager cannot control every action of the people who work with him. The employee has a duty to do the work to standard, to report obstacles and not to carry out forbidden or unsafe actions.

But if the instruction was unclear, the target unachievable or the required way of working clashed with real constraints, the manager cannot transfer all the responsibility to the one who carried it out.

He must examine his own role in creating the mistake too.

Otherwise leadership turns into a mechanism where the power to decide stays at the top, while the consequences of every decision travel downwards.

And the organisation begins to run on a contradiction.

Employees must carry out orders.

But, if the result is bad, they must prove they were not the ones who made the mistake.

A relationship like this does not develop responsibility.

It develops fear.

And fear is not always visible.

It shows in the silence before a wrong decision.

In the absence of questions.

In the agreement given only to avoid conflict.

In reports where everything is presented as the manager wants to read it.

In the end, the man who demands unconditional obedience may find he is surrounded by people who no longer dare to warn him.

And that is a very dangerous form of professional loneliness.

But there is another way of getting it wrong.

A more sophisticated one.

A more acceptable one.

The manager admits the mistake.

He does it publicly.

Perhaps in a meeting, in front of the whole team.

“Yes, it was my decision. I take responsibility.”

The words sound good.

People value honesty.

The meeting goes on.

But later, nothing changes.

The employee who carried the extra load gets no support.

The procedure that created the lack of clarity stays the same.

The consequences of the decision go on weighing on the people who did not take it.

And the manager, having said publicly that he takes responsibility, begins to consider the matter closed.

An important distinction has to be made here.

Admitting fault is not the same as taking responsibility.

Admitting is an act.

Responsibility is a process.

It asks you to understand what damage has been done, what can be corrected and what must change so that the same situation does not repeat.

It asks you to protect people from the unfair consequences of your decision, within the authority and means you have.

And sometimes it asks you to accept a personal consequence too.

Because a responsibility that never costs anything can easily turn into another form of presentation.

An elegant way of saying the right words, without changing anything about what made them necessary.

A good manager must know how to apologise.

But he must also know that an apology cannot be demanded as a duty from the people who have borne the consequences.

An employee may accept the apology and still be disappointed.

He may understand the manager's reasoning and still have no confidence that the situation will not repeat.

Trust does not come back just because the right sentence has been spoken.

It comes back when behaviour changes.

When the next warning is taken more seriously.

When an important decision is examined before it is carried out.

When the employee is not forced to choose between respecting authority and the duty to raise professional concerns.

When the manager does not try to explain every mistake in the way most favourable to himself.

And when people see that the standard of responsibility does not change with position in the hierarchy.

This is much harder than a public apology.

Because it cannot be done in five minutes.

It has to be proved in other decisions, on other days, often with no spectators.

Yet there is a risk in idealising the manager who admits every fault too.

A manager must not become a shield for every individual mistake, every conscious violation or every action carried out against clear instructions.

That would not be justice.

A team needs responsibility at every level.

Employees must respect standards, ask for clarification when instructions are unclear and not blindly carry out unlawful or unsafe demands.

Managers must give achievable instructions, listen to well-founded objections and not use authority to avoid the consequences of their own decisions.

Responsibility must not be artificially concentrated in one individual just because he holds the highest title.

But neither can it vanish from that individual precisely because of the title he holds.

An honest analysis of a failure may reveal shared responsibilities.

It may show that the decision was wrong, but also that the execution had shortcomings.

It may reveal that information was not reported as it should have been.

Or that the procedure had not foreseen an ordinary situation.

The aim must not be to find a single person to carry the whole weight.

It must be to understand what happened and to set responsibility without privilege and without injustice.

There is something power can take from a person without his noticing.

The habit of doubting his own opinion.

At first, the manager listens.

He asks for arguments.

He examines alternatives.

Then come the results, the experience, the titles and the years of work.

People begin to ask his opinion more and more often.

His decisions are carried out.

Objections become rarer.

And slowly, he may begin to confuse the absence of objection with the accuracy of his judgement.

But experience does not make a person infallible.

It can make him better at recognising patterns, assessing risks and taking decisions in hard conditions.

But it can also make him more certain of assumptions he has not checked for a long time.

A decision that worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

A method that suited one team may be wrong for another.

A way of leading that once produced results may have become an obstacle to the development of people.

That is why a professional climbing the hierarchy must keep something many people lose along the way.

The ability to be corrected by someone with less authority.

This does not diminish his worth.

On the contrary, it is one of the most important proofs that authority has not overcome his judgement.

One of the most honest tests of leadership appears after a wrong decision.

Not at the moment the manager realises the mistake.

But at the moment he has to decide what to do with that realisation.

Will he try to defend the decision, because he has already put his name on it?

Will he look for an explanation that makes him seem less responsible?

Will he shift attention to the mistakes of the people who carried it out?

Or will he agree to examine the decision by the same standard he would use for a subordinate's decision?

The last is the hardest.

Because it asks you to give up a privilege that power offers almost by itself.

The privilege of being the kindest judge of your own mistakes.

And perhaps this is where professional character begins.

Not when a person is certain.

Not when he is right.

But when the facts begin to contradict his conviction and he has to choose between defending the truth and defending himself.

There are managers who believe that admitting a mistake weakens authority.

That employees will lose respect.

That such a sentence will be used against them.

This fear may be real, especially in organisations where a mistake is treated as a political weapon and not as a chance to learn.

But silence has a cost too.

People can tell when a manager is trying to avoid responsibility.

They understand when a story changes once the result becomes unpleasant.

They see when someone who demands discipline from others begins to use excuses for himself.

Perhaps they do not speak.

Perhaps they go on respecting the title.

They may carry out orders with the same precision.

But something changes.

They no longer see the manager as someone who defends a shared standard.

They see him as someone who uses standards for others and circumstances for himself.

And an authority that works only through position, and no longer rests on trust, becomes more and more expensive to exercise.

It needs more control.

More checking.

More intervention.

Because people may go on obeying a manager they do not trust.

But they rarely give him the same honesty, initiative and readiness that they give someone they consider fair.

In the end, leadership is not a guarantee that we will always take the best decision.

It is accepting the responsibility to decide when a decision must be taken.

To ask for help when we do not know enough.

To listen to objections when they have a basis.

To stop an order when we discover it is wrong.

And not to load onto someone else the whole burden of the consequences just because he was the one who carried it out.

There is nothing humiliating in admitting a mistake.

Humiliation begins when a person is ready to sacrifice the truth to keep up the appearance of infallibility.

And there is nothing noble in taking responsibility if it remains only a statement.

Responsibility has value when it forces us to act differently.

When it makes us more careful with power.

When it teaches us that one sentence from us can change the hours, the workload and the working conditions of people who had no chance to take that decision.

Because the order may be short.

But its weight is not measured by the number of words.

It is measured by what it asks others to do.

On a hard day, a manager may have given an instruction that did not work.

He may have taken the decision with incomplete information.

He may have underestimated a risk or failed to hear a warning.

None of these necessarily defines all of his professional ability.

But how he behaves once he understands the mistake says a great deal about his relationship with authority.

He can protect his reputation by changing the explanation.

He can spread the responsibility until nobody knows any more where the problem began.

He can choose a careful sentence in which everyone has erred a little and nobody has decided anything.

Or he can stand in front of the people and say:

“I took the decision. My reasoning was wrong. Now we must correct the consequences and understand how not to repeat it.”

This sentence does not solve the problem by itself.

It does not bring back the lost time.

It does not erase the damage.

But it puts something very important in its place.

Responsibility.

And without it, no improvement can be fully honest.

I am convinced that authority is not proved only at the moment people carry out what you ask of them.

It is proved also at the moment you have to tell them you should not have asked it.

There, where the security of the title ends and the responsibility of the person begins.

Because anyone can have an office, a position and the right to give instructions.

It is harder not to use that position as a refuge when your decisions produce consequences.

Managers have no duty to be infallible.

They have a duty not to turn power into a way of walking away from their own mistakes.

And if one day I had to choose between the appearance of a manager who is always right and the responsibility of a manager who is able to admit a mistake, my choice would be clear.

Because a reputation held up by hiding the truth is far more fragile than it looks.

While trust built through responsibility can survive even a bad decision.

I gave the wrong order.

A sentence that must not be the end of authority.

It must be the beginning of responsibility.

Because on good days it is easy to stand in front of the team and talk about success.

The character of a manager is measured also on the day he has to stand in front of the same people and not hide behind them.