You’ve Made A Mistake. Now What?

Anyone who has worked in an office for more than a day has made a mistake. While most people accept that slip-ups are unavoidable, no one likes to be responsible for them. The good news is that mistakes, even big ones, don’t have to leave a permanent mark on your career. In fact, most contribute to organizational and personal learning; they are an essential part of experimentation and a prerequisite for innovation. So don’t worry: if you’ve made a mistake at work, — and, again, who hasn’t? — you can recover gracefully and use the experience to learn and grow.

It is much better to accept mistakes, learn from them, and move on. “Look forward and base decisions on the future not the past,” Schoemaker says. Christopher Gergen, the director of the Entrepreneurial Leadership Initiative at Duke University and co-author of Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, agrees. The most useful thing you can do is “translate a mistake into a valuable moment of leadership,” he says.

Fess up and acknowledge your mistake
First and foremost, it’s critical to be transparent, candid, and own up to the error. Don’t try to blame others. Even if it was a group mistake, acknowledge your role in it. In cases where someone was hurt, issue an apology. However, don’t apologize too much or be defensive. The key is to be action-oriented and focus on the future. How will your misstep be remedied? What will you do differently going forward?

Once you’ve admitted your blunder, it may be appropriate to reframe it. Reframing is not making an excuse, but a genuine effort to help people see the mistake in a different light. Poor decisions or flawed processes can sometimes lead to mistakes, but that doesn’t mean that every bad outcome is a mistake. Gergen says it’s important to understand what was external and internal, what was in your control and what wasn’t. Explaining in a non-defensive way what led to the mistake can help people better understand why it happened and how to avoid it in the future.

The WDDinc perspective: A good friend likes to say: Be hard on the processes, not the people. Making mistakes helps us all get better.