An organization I was working with had developed corrective action plans on initiatives that weren’t doing as well as expected. My first question was whether the issue was strategic, i.e., the idea or plan was wrong, or execution, i.e., they were missing on the implementation side. On that day, across from me sat the Chief Financial Officer for the organization. His answer to my question was the misses were the result of failures of execution of the strategy. My follow up question was, “Why do you think the organization struggles with executing plans?” He paused as he thought for a moment, then told me, “Dale, we give too much grace here. It’s a culture of grace and not holding people accountable.”

Grace is when someone doesn’t receive punishment that is truly deserved for a failure. As Christians, we believe we are all born as sinners and need Gods’ forgiveness and grace. Whether it’s in your personal or professional life, most of us would tell you grace isn’t a bad thing when it is extended to us. In fact, we love it.

In a work setting, if you frequently give grace to someone it probably means there is both a problem and a pattern. It’s a problem because they failed at something. It’s possible they missed a deadline, their work was shoddy and didn’t meet the expected standard, they were rude to a co-worker, or something else. It’s a pattern because they are failing frequently, whether it’s the same problem repeatedly, or it’s a variety of problems, a new one each time. It’s not good for you, your team or the organization if you need to continually give grace to someone. It means something needs to be done.

If you are a leader who continually gives grace, multiple times over to the same person, in my experience it’s probably related to one or two things you’ll need to overcome.

1. You care – On the surface caring is a good thing. You should care about your employees who work for you. Sometimes we can care too much when we think more about them than their teammates and others who are impacted by their failures. With each failure, someone else is hurt in some way. I’ve also known leaders who deep down know they should deal with it, the person isn’t a good fit, but they believe the person will have a hard time finding another job to support their family, so they even make excuses on their behalf. Wrong. Remember, you are judged on the effectiveness of your team and how it helps your constituency, your continued grace isn’t helping anyone.
2. You fear conflict – Yes, leaders fear and dread conflict and some see the conversation of holding someone accountable to be conflict. They don’t want to debate, which often happens, or hear the excuses, or … Yet doing nothing is giving grace that the person hasn’t earned and probably doesn’t deserve.

When should we give grace? When someone is learning something new, they will make mistakes. It’s part of the learning process. What I always looked for was whether they made the same mistake again. As they progress, they should be building up a track record of success, which might entitle them to grace for failure because it’s an outlier, it’s not normal. I also look to see if someone has been humbled by their failure and know they should receive grace. They hold themselves accountable.

I remember working with a manufacturer who had an employee who made a mistake in running his machine, the result was $5,000 worth of damaged goods. His supervisor wanted to fire him, but the owner said, “No!”, and was willing to give grace. The supervisor said, “I don’t understand why, it just cost us $5,000?”, to which the owner responded, “He’s been a good employee for many years, and I just invested another $5,000 into his development, why would I fire him and lose that investment.”

The owner understood the concept of grace, and I imagine the employee never did it again and remained a great contributor.

God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. James 4:6 (NLT)