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As leaders, we are all very familiar with the dangers of the horn effect and we therefore consciously make efforts to avoid it.
What we forget is that we are also subject to the complementary halo effect — where we have the cognitive bias that prevents us from accepting that a person did something wrong.
Just as the horn effect is dangerous, as we penalize a person for mistakes that they are not responsible for, the halo effect prevents us from holding a person accountable for a mistake that they are responsible for. And, if mistakes go uncorrected, these mistakes may snowball into bigger mistakes that could be catastrophic to the organization.
As leaders, we need to be aware of the twin biases — horn and halo — impacting our decisions. The success of our team depends on us being objective when dealing with mistakes.
