Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Help Their Team Bounce Back from Failure
Transcript
- Lucas: You just got promoted to manager three months ago. Your team has been working around the clock on a product launch, and yesterday — the day before the deadline — a senior engineer discovered a critical bug that pushed everything back by at least two weeks. Your VP wants answers, your team is demoralized, and you're wondering if this is the moment your short management career falls apart. Luna: That scenario is terrifying, and it happens more often than we like to admit. I've seen new managers either go into full damage-control mode or spiral into self-blame. Lucas: Right, and the instinct is often to assign blame or rush into 'let's fix it' without pausing to process. But how you handle failure in those first few months can set the tone for your entire tenure. If today's episode helps you avoid that pitfall, consider supporting the show so we keep making these conversations ad-free — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Luna: Yeah, that kind of listener support is what lets us stay independent and dive deep into topics like this. So let's get into it — what's your take on the first thing a new manager should do when the team fails? Lucas: The first thing is to separate the emotional reaction from the analytical one. Your team is looking at you to see if you panic or if you stay steady. I learned this from a VP of engineering at a mid-size SaaS company who told me that after a major outage, he would sit with the team and literally write down what happened without any judgment — just the facts. Luna: So it's like data collection first, not problem-solving. That makes sense because if everyone is feeling defensive, you can't get to the real root cause. Lucas: Exactly. And research backs this up. A 2024 study from the University of Michigan found that teams that explicitly treat failures as learning opportunities — rather than something to hide — see a 30% increase in innovation metrics within six months. So there's a concrete payoff to getting this right. Luna: That's a big number. So what's the second step after you've collected the facts? Lucas: You run a blameless post-mortem. That's a term from the software world, but it applies everywhere. The key is to focus on systems, not people. Ask: what in our process allowed this to happen? Not who dropped the ball. In that SaaS example, the engineer who found the bug wasn't the one who wrote it — but the code review process failed to catch it because the reviewer was overloaded. Luna: And by making it blameless, you encourage people to speak up about their own mistakes without fear. That builds psychological safety over time. Lucas: Right, and that's the third piece: model vulnerability. If you as the manager share a mistake you made — maybe you didn't allocate enough resources, or you missed a warning sign — it signals that it's okay to be imperfect. I think of Ed Catmull at Pixar, who championed the idea of 'plussing' — taking a critique and building on it constructively. Luna: So instead of saying 'that scene doesn't work,' you say 'that scene doesn't work yet, and here's how we can make it better.' It's a language shift that changes the emotional dynamic. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the mindset you want after a failure. Not 'we failed, now we're doomed,' but 'we failed, now we're smarter.' Let's take a quick break, and when we come back I'll walk through a specific post-mortem script you can use with your team. Luna: Wait, before the break — is there a trap new managers fall into when they try to be vulnerable? Like oversharing? Lucas: Great question. Yes — the trap is making it about yourself. If you say 'I feel terrible, I really messed up,' that can shift the team's focus to comforting you instead of solving the problem. Vulnerability should be about the situation, not about your ego. Something like 'I should have caught that the QA timeline was too tight — let's fix that process now.' Luna: So it's owning your part without making the team manage your emotions. That's subtle but crucial. Lucas: Right. And after you've owned it, you pivot to action. So let's say your team wants to create a post-mortem document. You might structure it in four sections: what happened, what went right, what went wrong, and what we'll change. The 'what went right' is important because it prevents the conversation from becoming purely negative. Luna: And you involve the whole team in proposing the changes, right? Not just you deciding. Lucas: Absolutely. Autonomy is a huge motivator. If the team feels ownership over the fix, they're more likely to commit to it. I've seen teams turn a missed deadline into a stronger deployment process that actually saved them time later. Luna: That's the resilience piece — you don't just recover, you come back stronger. Lucas: Exactly. Let me give you a specific example. A product team at a company called SpotOn — they're a payments platform — missed a major feature launch by six weeks. The new manager, a woman named Priya, used a blameless post-mortem and discovered that the engineering team had been given conflicting priorities from two different VPs. She didn't point fingers; she just documented the conflict and escalated it up. The team felt heard, and within a quarter they were shipping faster than before. Luna: So the failure actually revealed a systemic issue that would have caused problems anyway. She turned a crisis into a catalyst for improvement. Lucas: That's the ideal outcome. But it requires you as the manager to stay calm, be transparent, and keep the focus on learning. If you blame or shame, you reinforce a culture where people hide their mistakes — and that's far more dangerous than the mistake itself. Luna: So as a new manager, your number one job when a failure happens is to create the conditions for a productive post-mortem. It's not to have all the answers or to make it go away. Lucas: Right. You're the host of the conversation, not the fixer. And if you can do that consistently, your team will trust you to handle the next crisis too. That trust is the foundation of resilience. Luna: We've covered a lot — any final thought for someone in that scenario right now? Lucas: Remember that your own learning curve as a manager includes failures. The way you handle this early setback will shape how your team views you and themselves. So take a breath, gather the facts, involve the team, and focus on improvement. You've got this. Luna: And if you want to keep hearing practical, ad-free advice like this, you know where to find us. Lucas: That's right — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time on New Manager Conversations.