Leave the Mistake Up
I hit publish and felt the stomach drop you only get when you know you moved too fast. The change was wrong. It was visible. Everyone in the company could see it.
A junior on my team pinged me: “Want me to pull it and repush?”
No. Leave it.
Not as a stunt. Not as performative humility. Leave it because an error you can see is a map you can use. Scrub it and the lesson evaporates. Leave it and everyone learns where the floor actually tilts.
That habit started years ago in small military units that had to operate with little command in the field. You get a clear intent, limited time, and incomplete information. You build the mission from real-time data. You own outcomes, adjust fast, and keep moving. Later, in logistics and operations, the context changed but the rule stayed the same: surface the error, study it, fix it where it failed, then run it again.
Here is what that looks like in practice.
We roll a new workflow live with monitoring on. If it breaks, we note the breakpoint in plain language. We ask the person closest to that step to explain what they saw. We propose a fix. We rerun. We verify. No ceremony. No blame-hunting. Just forward motion with a record the next person can use.
People think removing mistakes protects credibility. It usually protects confusion. When teams never see friction, they assume no one else stumbles, so they hide their own. Then small problems grow teeth. You get late surprises, defensive meetings, and a culture of appearances. I would rather show the seams and teach pace, honesty, and recovery.
A quick example. That published change I mentioned? We left it visible for one hour. We labeled the issue, pushed the correction, and kept a short note in the channel: what failed, why it failed, what we changed, how we verified. That junior who messaged me now tags breakpoints before I do. He is faster because he knows it is safe to say “this is wrong” and then fix it. That is how you build future leads. Give them real responsibility, real feedback, and visible reps under pressure.
This is not recklessness. It is controlled exposure. We do not gamble with safety or compliance. We do pressure-test new systems where failure will teach the most and harm the least. The point is to shorten the distance between “it broke” and “we understand why.”
Gen Z does well in this environment. They want purpose and they want to see how decisions get made. When you leave an error up long enough to teach it, you give them both. They learn decision-making, clear communication, and real accountability. Those are life skills, not just job skills.
A few rules we use to keep it clean:
Name the error quickly.
Explain the why like you would to a new hire.
Fix it where it happened so the context is intact.
Record the learning in one or two sentences.
Rerun and verify the fix.
Move on. No victory laps. No public floggings.
If you lead from a distance, this will feel risky. If you lead from the work, it will feel normal. Small units taught me that an honest after-action is worth more than a polished story. Operations taught me that teams copy what leaders do, not what they say. If you hide your errors, they will hide theirs. If you show how to recover, they will learn to recover faster.
I do not need to be the smartest person in the room. I need the room to surface truth quickly. That often means the person closest to the task corrects me. Good. They are the sensor. My job is to keep the channel open, absorb the hit, and make sure the system learns.
Leave the mistake up long enough to teach. Then fix it and keep moving.