Latest / New Manager Conversations with Fexingo: First 90 Days, Managing Former Peers, and Leadership Basics / How New Managers Can Handle Being Wrong in Front of Their Team
Transcript
- Lucas: You've been a manager for maybe three months. You're in a sprint retro with your team, and you realize—mid-sentence—that the guidance you gave two weeks ago was flat wrong. The data you cited was incomplete. The call you made steered the team down a dead end. Luna: Oh, that feeling. That hot flush. You can either double down or admit it. But admitting it feels like you're showing weakness, especially when you're new. Lucas: Exactly. And the conventional advice often says 'project confidence, never let them see you sweat.' But the research actually says the opposite for new managers. A 2024 study from Harvard Business Review looked at leader fallibility across 47 organizations. They found that managers who acknowledged mistakes openly were rated 12 percent higher on trust by their direct reports after six months, compared to those who deflected or explained away errors. Luna: Twelve percent is significant. And I think the key is that it's not about being wrong all the time—it's about how you handle it when you are. Lucas: Right. So let's talk about a real case. I talked to an engineering manager at a mid-size SaaS company—let's call her Priya. She was about 90 days into her first management role. Her team was struggling with a sprint bottleneck—work kept getting stuck in code review. Priya looked at the data and concluded the bottleneck was the QA team taking too long. She called a meeting, asked QA to speed up. A week later, one of her senior engineers pulled her aside and showed her that the actual bottleneck was the dev team submitting code in huge chunks late in the sprint. QA was waiting on them, not the other way around. Luna: So she had blamed the wrong team publicly. That's the nightmare scenario for a new manager. Lucas: It is. And Priya's first instinct was to defend her analysis—she'd spent hours on those charts. But she took a breath, and she said to the engineer, 'I got this wrong. Thanks for catching it. I need to correct that with the whole team.' The next day, she opened the standup with a short apology. Luna: What did she actually say? Because there's a right way and a wrong way to apologize as a manager. Lucas: She used a simple three-step framework that I think is really useful. Step one: acknowledge the mistake specifically. She said, 'Last week I attributed the sprint bottleneck to QA turnaround times. That was incorrect. The data I used didn't account for submission size. I should have dug deeper.' Step two: explain what you're doing to fix it. She said, 'I'm going to work with the dev team to break down submissions into smaller chunks earlier in the sprint.' Step three: invite feedback. She said, 'If you see me making a similar mistake in the future, please call it out. I need that transparency.' Luna: I love that third step. It turns the apology into a signal that she's open to learning, not just saving face. Lucas: Exactly. And that's backed by Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety. She defines it as the belief that you won't be punished for speaking up with ideas, questions, or mistakes. When the leader models that by admitting their own error, it gives permission for everyone else to do the same. Luna: But there's a nuance. Not all mistakes are equal. There's a difference between a 'learning mistake'—where you made a reasonable call with incomplete info—and a 'competence mistake,' where you should have known better. How do you differentiate? Lucas: Great question. The HBR study actually coded for that. Learning mistakes are things like misinterpreting ambiguous data, trying a new process that fails, or delegating to the wrong person because you didn't know their strengths yet. Competence mistakes are things like forgetting a key deadline, failing to prepare for a client meeting, or ignoring a policy you should have known. The research found that admitting learning mistakes boosted trust significantly, but admitting competence mistakes had a neutral effect—it didn't hurt trust, but it didn't help either. Because the team expects you to know certain basics. Luna: So the takeaway isn't 'confess every error.' It's 'be strategic about which ones you own publicly.' Lucas: Right. For competence mistakes, the best move is usually to fix it quietly and then share the lesson learned after the fact. But for learning mistakes—and Priya's case is a classic example—owning it publicly builds more trust than trying to finesse it. Luna: There's also the question of frequency. If you're wrong every other week, even great apologies start to wear thin. Trust is built on a pattern of good judgment, not on perfect apologies. Lucas: That's a really important point. Amy Edmondson distinguishes between 'intelligent failures'—useful experiments that fail—and 'unnecessary failures'—preventable sloppiness. As a new manager, you want the first kind to be visible and the second kind to be rare. Priya's mistake was an intelligent failure: she had good intentions, reasonable data, but incomplete context. The team understood that. Luna: I think one reason managers resist admitting mistakes is the fear that they'll lose authority. But the data suggests the opposite: that authority actually comes from being seen as honest and self-aware, not infallible. Lucas: Yeah. And there's a generational shift here too. A 2023 survey from Gallup found that millennials and Gen Z employees rank transparency as the second most important leadership trait, after competence. They're less tolerant of the old 'command and control' style where the manager always has to be right. So if you're a new manager in your late twenties or early thirties managing people your own age, pretending you never make mistakes is actually a liability. Luna: It's almost like the old advice to 'fake it till you make it' only works if you're also willing to say 'I faked it, I was wrong, let's adjust.' Lucas: Exactly. And that brings me to another practical tactic: when you correct yourself, don't just apologize—be explicit about what you learned. So instead of 'I was wrong,' say 'I was wrong because I overlooked X factor. Now I know to check Y first.' That turns the moment into a teaching tool for the team. Luna: That's a good habit. It frames the mistake as a data point, not a character flaw. Lucas: And that's something we try to do on this show too—we're always learning and adjusting. And you know, that's one reason we keep the show ad-free. We don't want to interrupt the conversation with commercials, and we want the content to be driven by what's useful, not by sponsors. Luna: Yeah, and if you find value in that approach, you can support it at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a simple way to keep things going without ads. Lucas: Exactly. So back to the framework. I want to give listeners a concrete tool they can use tomorrow. When you realize you've given wrong direction, there are four steps: one, stop the incorrect guidance immediately. Two, acknowledge it to the affected people—the sooner the better, even if it's awkward. Three, provide the corrected direction with reasoning. And four, thank the person who helped you see the error, publicly if possible. Luna: That fourth step is critical. It reinforces that speaking up is rewarded, not punished. In Priya's case, she thanked the senior engineer in front of the team—and later, that same engineer started flagging potential issues earlier. Lucas: Exactly. She turned a moment of vulnerability into a culture shift. Six months later, her team had one of the lowest defect rates in the company, and she attributed it directly to that early episode of being wrong and owning it. Luna: So to summarize: being wrong as a new manager isn't a career-ending event. How you handle it is. Acknowledge specifically, fix transparently, and invite feedback. And differentiate between learning mistakes and competence mistakes. Lucas: I'd add one more thing: don't wait to be perfect before you start leading. The team already knows you're human. The question is whether you'll act like it. And if you do, you'll actually build a stronger foundation than if you pretended otherwise. Luna: Great place to leave it. Thanks, Lucas. Lucas: Thanks, Luna. Talk next time.