Forgiveness

THE TENSION

Forgiveness. In technical environments where errors have real consequences, the instinct to hold a mistake against someone is not unreasonable. But there is a difference between maintaining appropriate standards and carrying resentment - and the second one is rarely visible from the inside.

“You can hold someone’s mistake against them without ever saying a word about it. They still feel it.”

THE SCENARIO

Morgan Delgado has been Spatial Solutions Team Lead at Esri Australia for eleven months. Their team guides the implementation and support of enterprise GIS platforms for clients across government, resources, and utilities - sophisticated, relationship-dependent work where trust between the team and its clients is everything.

Six months ago, one of Morgan’s senior consultants, Dev, made a configuration error on a client deployment that caused a significant data loss incident. The client was managed. The issue was resolved. Dev apologised directly and thoroughly, and his technical work since has been meticulous.

Morgan has not said anything further about it. Professionally, the matter is closed.

But in team meetings, something has shifted. Dev raises suggestions that Morgan engages with briefly before moving on. When client assignments are allocated, Dev is consistently given lower-complexity work. In a recent project debrief, Dev offered an insight that was genuinely valuable - Morgan acknowledged it, then asked someone else to develop it.

Dev has noticed. The rest of the team has noticed. Two team members have mentioned it to each other, not to Morgan.

Morgan has not forgiven Dev. They have simply stopped talking about it while continuing to act from it.

WHAT’S DRIVING IT

Forgiveness is the quality of being able to let go and move on - to completely discard resentment, anger, or hurt towards a person in relation to a specific act or event. It is not about condoning what happened. It is about freeing yourself from the past so that the present is no longer being shaped by it.

Morgan’s resentment is not unreasonable in origin. The incident caused real problems. But the way they are holding it - silently, through allocation decisions and brief acknowledgements and slightly shortened eye contact - is having consequences that extend well beyond Dev. The whole team is now navigating around an invisible charge that Morgan has not acknowledged and therefore cannot be resolved.

Unforgiveness in leadership rarely looks like hostility. It looks like exactly what Morgan is doing: functional, professional, and subtly corrosive.

A HEALTHY RELATIONSHIP WITH FORGIVENESS

A healthy relationship with forgiveness means you mostly experience freedom from resentment and choose to discard anger or hurt towards yourself and others quickly and completely. Others experience you as someone who can move on from negative experiences with ease, who actively resolves issues and restores relationships rather than managing around them.

In practice, this does not mean forgetting. It means that Dev’s deployment error no longer determines the quality of attention Morgan gives his ideas, the complexity of work he is trusted with, or the experience of his colleagues in the room. Morgan can hold high standards and let go of the incident simultaneously. The two are not in conflict — unless resentment is still doing the work.

REFLECTION PROMPTS

- Is there someone in your team whose mistake you consider professionally resolved but whose standing with you has not actually recovered?

- What signals - in allocation decisions, in meeting dynamics, in your own attention - might suggest that you are still holding something you believe you have let go?

- What would it cost you to genuinely forgive a team member’s error - and what might it give your team?

- What is the difference between maintaining standards and carrying resentment - and which one is currently shaping your leadership?

If you suspect there is something you’re still holding that you believe you’ve resolved

- The Being Profile explores how forgiveness operates in your leadership - and what becomes available in your team when the past is genuinely released. Get in touch at hello@mappingbeing.com.au

While the organisations referenced exist, the team lead, other people and the team name have been used for demonstration purposes only. Any resemblance to real-life people, teams, organisations or situations is purely coincidental.

Reference: Tashvir, A. (2021). BEING (p. 439). Engenesis Publications.

[Published: 20 July 2026]