For the past few weeks, I’ve been writing about mistakes—how we make them, how we respond, and how leaders can guide their teams through them. This week, I want to address perhaps the most dangerous type of all mistakes: the mistakes that have become normalized.

These are the dysfunctions that have become “just how things are.” The leader who consistently interrupts others in meetings. The team that routinely misses deadlines but adjusts expectations instead of fixing the root cause. The process that creates confusion every time, yet people work around it rather than improve it.

We stop seeing these patterns as mistakes because they’ve become our baseline. What started as an exception has quietly become the standard. Part of the problem is that naming these normalized mistakes feels risky. Calling out a long-standing pattern, especially one involving leadership, feels uncomfortable at best and might provoke anger at worst. So instead of addressing it, people adjust, accommodate, rationalize, or simply move on.

But these “invisible” mistakes create a slow leak in trust, efficiency, and morale. People adapt, but adaptation isn’t the same as acceptance. The cost accumulates over time.

At leadership retreats, I often pose this question: “What processes, behaviors, or patterns are we treating as acceptable that we actually need to address?” The responses are always revealing. Teams discover they’ve been tiptoeing around the same issues for months or even years.

I recommend asking this question in your department and organization. Give your colleagues time to reflect and discuss in small groups. And whatever they share, listen intently rather than being dismissive or defensive. Sometimes the biggest breakthroughs come from recognizing that our biggest problems have been hiding in plain sight.