Out of all the things we do as leaders, one of the most difficult is dealing with poor or substandard performance.  Inside that broad spectrum there are crimes, sabotage, toxic people, idiocy and people on the wrong bus or on the right bus, but in the wrong seat.  The most common recognition points concerning poor performance are missing deadlines, poor quality of the work submitted, not making the sales quota and mistakes.  Mistakes tend to be public events and so the team are watching how you deal with them.  Your credibility with your people and their consequent loyalty to you can be clearly compromised if you get this wrong.   I joined the rest of the seniors in the firm for the weekly meeting in this quite tight meeting room with the new Group President.  With so many people crammed in there, it was a bit claustrophobic on a good day. He had a resume that was platinum, a prince among men, an elite double alumnus of one of the best varsities, highly intelligent and a boot strapped, self-made executive.  He arrived into the organisation and quickly had fired our boss, so he was “taking care” of us, until the new head was appointed.    In the first meeting, I happened to be seated opposite him, but ever so fortunately not directly in front of him.  I mention this because it became very important in subsequent weekly meetings.  He was not satisfied with our results and like one of those amazing super sports cars, he went from zero to 100, in seconds and exploded with rage, decalcifying the spines of those unfortunates who chose the cheap seats directly in front of him.    Observing this phenomena and preferring a better quality of work life, I purposely chose the same side of the table where he would sit and made sure I was well down toward the end of the table.  You actually have to lean around and contort your body to excoriate someone seated in my location, so I just calmly observed the weekly humiliation of those seated in the death zone.  What was our opinion of this corporate prince?  How were the trust levels?  What about the loyalty factor?  Trust me, they were all exceedingly bad.   I was astonished that someone with his pedigree, in his position, could get to the top, without the ability to control his emotions and anger. As a side note, he subsequently chose the completely wrong person for the job of head of our business and everyone in that room departed from the firm and the business was effectively destroyed.  Actually he destroyed the Group and eventually he was shown the door himself, so the radius on the circle of karma is shorter than we all think.  I occasionally run into hm and even now, many years later, alI I can think about were those brutal torture sessions   This boss “rage-athon” is clearly what not to do, so how should we handle mistakes so that we don’t blow up the whole enterprise?  There are multiple stages to handling mistakes and we will approach an important fork in the road, depending on how the person reacts to their mistake. Let’s investigate the stages.   Stage 1.  Research We have to ignore what we might be told by others about what happened and get the real facts.  “Oh, you can’t believe what Tanaka has done now”, is the character assassin’s technique for removing rivals or people they don’t like.  They try to mould our opinion about what has happened and poison the well. We simply must ignore this type of talk and take careful note of the motives of the messenger.  We shouldn’t have any views on the mistake, until we have gathered all the relevant detail.  If the mistake is a large one, we start the research with the question, “Is the person worth saving?” in the back of our minds.   Stage 2. Begin with Rapport Rapport is like a bank account of good relations and mutual trust built up over a long time.  We draw on this when we start the discussion.  We want to put them at ease and reduce their anxiety.  We give them some honest appreciation about other aspects of their work and we suppo