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What is the right mindset for dealing with mistakes as a first-time supervisor?
Nobody — including experienced supervisors — has everything figured out. Every decision gets made with incomplete information. The right approach is an experimenter mindset: make the best call you can, and if you get it wrong, admit it quickly, adjust, and fix the problem. Perfectionism is not a strength here — it actively makes the people you manage feel unsafe making mistakes of their own.
You Were Never Supposed to Have All the Answers
One of the most paralyzing myths about becoming a supervisor for the first time is the belief that you must now be infallible. You were promoted because of your results — but results were built on trial, adjustment, and iteration. That process does not stop at the supervisor level.
In episode 451 of Ordinary To Badass, Marie Sonneman is direct about this: no one walks into a supervisory role with the full picture. Decisions happen under uncertainty. That is not a flaw in you — it is simply the reality of leadership.
The shift is not from imperfection to perfection. It is from paralysis to action. Making a thoughtful decision with the information you have is always better than waiting for a certainty that will never arrive.
Perfectionism Doesn't Protect You — It Blocks Your Team
There is a secondary cost to perfectionism that new supervisors rarely anticipate. When you demand flawlessness from yourself — visibly, through your reactions and your standards — you send a clear signal to the people around you: mistakes are not tolerated here.
That signal is devastating to team performance. People stop taking initiative. They stop flagging problems early. They start hiding errors rather than solving them. As Marie Sonneman unpacks across the eight lessons covered in this episode, the way you handle your own missteps sets the cultural tone for everyone below you.
Admitting a mistake quickly — and visibly correcting course — is not weakness. It is the most credible thing a supervisor can do. It demonstrates that accountability flows downward from the top, not just upward from the team.
"If people like you but they don't trust your judgment, you have a popularity problem, not a leadership advantage. Trust lasts longer than approval."
Marie Sonneman — Host, Ordinary To Badass
This distinction matters directly for how mistakes land. A supervisor who is liked but not trusted will be judged harshly for every error. A supervisor who has built genuine trust — through consistent judgment and honest accountability — earns the room to be wrong sometimes.
That trust, as Sonneman argues throughout Ordinary To Badass, is built through behavior over time — not through a perfect record.
See also
How should new female leaders handle the fact that not everyone will think they deserve the promotion?
The higher you move, the more opinions people have — some will think you were promoted too soon, others that you don't deserve it. Your job is not to manage those opinions, but to lead with credibility and let your decisions speak for themselves.
Do all women support other women who get promoted?
Not all women will support a promoted colleague — some of the toughest criticism can come from other women. Marie Sonneman references guest Dina Johnson Lee to underscore that this reality, while uncomfortable, is something new leaders must be prepared for.
Why does leadership feel lonely at first, especially for women in male-dominated industries?
Leadership gets lonelier before it gets easier because changing positions causes people to test you, question you, and separate from you. Marie Sonneman addresses this as one of the hardest and least-discussed realities of a first promotion.
Key takeaways
- Every supervisor — at every level — makes decisions with incomplete information. That is the baseline condition of leadership, not a sign of inadequacy.
- The experimenter mindset means committing to action, staying alert to feedback, and correcting fast when something does not work.
- Visible perfectionism from a supervisor creates a team culture where people hide errors instead of solving them — the opposite of what you need.
- Trust, built through honest accountability over time, outlasts any short-term approval boost — a core theme throughout Ordinary To Badass.
Episode 451 covers eight things nobody tells women before their first promotion — this mindset shift is one of them.
Listen to the episode on Listenly