Mistakes at scale

The beauty of a healthy, effective team is an effect of scale. Many hands, they say, make light work.

But what happens if your team is not working so well? Unfortunately, the same principle of scale applies — it’s just a little less beautiful.

When you're working alone, a mistake here and there can be frustrating, but you can recover.

The larger your team, the more troubling a simple mistake will be.

• Data entered incorrectly — or not at all — by one person can add hours of work for the others on your team.

• Reports created with the wrong criteria can lead your whole team to make critical decisions based on incorrect information.

This is the problem of mistakes at scale.

And it's usually the result of insufficient training.

Of course, training your staff well takes time and effort.

Funny thing is, when your staff are well trained, your team saves time and effort. This makes training a smart investment, not a frivolous expense.

So, you can budget some time (and optionally money) for staff training, or you can just budget those resources for dealing with frustration and inefficiency.

The difference is, one of those makes your people effective, empowered, and appreciated.

And that, dear reader, is a beautiful thing.

All the best,
A.