This is an old quote that has been originally attributed to different people throughout the years. It shows up in a lot of different management books and, more recently, LinkedIn influencer posts.
It’s good for lightening the situation and adding some levity, but after hearing it repeated 100 different times from different books, podcasts, and LinkedIn quotes it has really worn on me as somewhat dishonest. It feels clever the first time you hear it, but really the cost of the mistake is a separate issue from the decision to fire someone for it.
In real world situations, the decision to let someone go involved a deeper dive into assessing whether the incident was really a one-off mistake, or the culmination of a pattern of careless behavior, failure to learn, or refusal to adopt good practices.
I’ve seen situations where the actual dollar amount of the damage was negligible, but the circumstances that caused the accident were so egregiously bad and avoidable that we couldn’t justify allowing the person to continue operating in the role. I wish it was as simple as training people up or having them learn from their mistakes, but some people are so relentlessly careless that it’s better for everyone to just cut losses.
However when the investigation shows that the incident really was a one-time mistake from someone with an otherwise strong history of learning and growing, cutting that person for a single accident is a mistake.
The important thing to acknowledge is point #3 from the post above: Once you’ve made an expensive mistake, that’s usually your last freebie. The next expensive mistake isn’t very likely to be joked away as another “expensive training”