Originally published on LinkedIn on 10 September 2026.
Situation 6: Addressing Mistakes
Every firm carries a cost that never shows up as its own line in your P&L. Instead, it shows up as movement in the numbers you already track every month. This week, that’s realisation rate. This cost commonly comes from the gap between how a leader reads a situation and how their team actually experiences it. Each week, this brief takes one situation, the pattern behind it, and shows exactly which number it moves.
How the leader reads it
Nobody decides, in the moment, to respond to a mistake differently depending on how the week is going. A quiet week gets a considered response, because there’s space to give it. A stretched week gets a sharper one, because there’s less patience to give. Each response feels reasonable at the time, and often the mistake itself genuinely was a little different too, which makes the different response easy to explain without pressure ever entering the picture.
What’s invisible from the leader’s side is the pattern across time. Even allowing for real differences between mistakes, the swing in tone tends to track your own workload more closely than it tracks how serious the mistake actually was. There’s no reason that would occur to you, since you’re only ever comparing today’s reaction to today’s mistake, never to how you handled something similar before.
How the team experiences it
The team is the only one actually positioned to see the pattern, because they’re the ones present for every instance, not just today’s. From their side, mistakes of similar severity get coached gently one week and reacted to sharply the next, and the difference doesn’t track anything they can point to, since it isn’t really about the mistake, it’s about whatever week the leader happens to be having.
That unpredictability carries its own weight, separate from how harsh any single reaction actually is. A 2022 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that leadership inconsistency, the gap between how a leader behaves in routine periods versus under pressure, is a stressor in its own right, regardless of whether the leader’s behaviour is generally positive or negative. Other research on leadership behaviour has found something even sharper: followers experience inconsistent, unpredictable negative treatment as worse treatment that’s consistently negative. Unpredictability itself is what does the damage, not just how harsh any one reaction is.
What it’s costing you
This shows up directly in realisation rate. When a response to a mistake depends on the leader’s pressure that week rather than the mistake itself, the correction doesn’t reliably stick. Sometimes it’s absorbed as real feedback, sometimes it’s absorbed as the leader having a hard day, and the associate has no consistent way to tell which one they just received.
Without a consistent signal, similar mistakes tend to recur, not because anyone’s being careless, but because the feedback loop that should have corrected the pattern for good never functioned as one. Recurring errors mean more rework, and rework is rarely something a client agrees to pay full rate for a second time, so it gets written down at the billing stage instead. Enough of that, across enough matters, and it shows up firm-wide as a drop in realisation rate.
Why your current reporting might not show this
A performance review captures a single point in time, usually a calm, prepared conversation, not the pattern of how mistakes were actually handled as they happened across a stressful quarter. It’s built to summarise, not to compare one instance of feedback against another months apart.
A 360 review has the same limitation, gathered once a year, from memory, it’s unlikely to surface something as specific as “the response depended on how busy you were,” since that requires noticing a pattern across many small moments, not recalling one general impression.
Neither tool asks the question that actually matters here: was the response the same every time, regardless of what else was happening that week? That’s a question about consistency over time, not a single data point, which is exactly why neither of these reports is built to catch it.
One question to ask this week
Think of the last two times you addressed a similar mistake, ideally weeks apart. Ask yourself plainly: were my two responses close enough that the person on the receiving end would recognise them as the same standard?
If you’re not sure, that’s worth sitting with.
Addressing Mistakes is one of the operational blind spots quietly costing firms real money, in realisation rate that trails off as the same errors keep recurring. If you want to know whether it’s happening in your own firm, and what it’s costing, the Operational Diagnostic is free and takes only a few minutes.