Is your management too fat?
While every company pays lip service to the claim that leadership is vital, few of them do anything to implement the idea. In fact, leadership usually consists of defending the status quo.
Management often sets up status walls between themselves and the rest of the company. As a result, they are overprotected from their own mistakes. Interest in being protected and avoiding responsibility and mistakes soon spreads throughout the company.
There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, but managers are a funny group. Somewhere along the line they become infallible. By definition, they don't make mistakes; so they become less tolerant of mistakes in their subordinates.
Result: People all down the line start spending too much of their time covering up mistakes when in fact they should be facing up to them and doing something about them.
Follow the rule of errors: If a person has the responsibility for a result, that person should be permitted to make the normal errors in decisions necessary to achieve that result. The fact is, if they're not making plenty of mistakes, they probably aren't making enough decisions or they aren't making them fast enough.
