Celebrate Blunders to Bolster Your Team
If your team has just made a royal mess of something, the last thing you probably want to do is throw a party. But approaching disaster with a sense of humor can do more to restore your team's confidence than a stern lecture or a freak-out fit.
So says Eva Smart, who details how a magazine typo that resulted in an outpouring of outraged responses got changed from a catastrophe into a cheerful celebration -- and helped keep the team's cohesion as a result.
Some ideas for turning botches into bonding?
The report was late: Tell everyone to come to work an hour later the next day, since no one seems to be able to tell time anyway.
The machine got broken: Hold a mock funeral and eulogize the deceased at great length.
The work was full of errors: Celebrate the biggest one(s). If the correct answer was 10 and the error said 20, bring in 20 balloons, get a cake with 20 candles, and give everyone 20 extra minutes for lunch.
Got any ideas of your own? Feel free to share!
(Bonus points to the readers who can find the three grammar/spelling errors in the image above.)
(image by Glenn Loos-Austin via Flickr, CC 2.0)