What to Do After You Make a Mistake at Work

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What to Do After You Make a Mistake at Work

What to Do After You Make a Mistake at Work

What to Do After You Make a Mistake at Work? Everyone makes mistakes at work.

Whether it’s losing your cool in a meeting or forgetting that report you were supposed to send at 3 pm, there are times when we inevitably mess up or fail.

These bumps in the road are a normal part of work, but if you manage them poorly, they can reduce your trustworthiness and damage your reputation.

As we start heading back into the office and figuring out what our “new normal” will be, the likelihood of miscommunications and mistakes is high.

With everything in a state of flux, you are almost guaranteed to encounter moments of misalignment.

Can you ignore an instant message and focus on your work?

Can you take a team meeting from your desk?

Can you go for a walk in the middle of the day?

This transition may feel particularly intimidating for remote hires coming into the office for the first time.

It is yet another unprecedented event rife with stress and uncertainty.

If that stress becomes too overwhelming, it can reduce your work performance and patience, lead to poor decision-making, and trigger reactive or domineering behaviours.

Don’t let these errors limit your career growth.

The next time you mess up, follow the strategies below to help you regain trust, minimise damage and mend the situation.

Be proactive

Once you know your mistake, try to get in front of the situation before it spirals.
Being proactive about addressing whatever took place demonstrates your awareness of the problem and relieves others from the potential discomfort of bringing it to your attention.
Take my former client Sabina, a finance executive, who began to hear whispers that people on her team found her condescending and overly controlling of their work.
Rather than dismissing the comments and letting the situation escalate, she immediately set up 1:1s with each team member to solicit their feedback and learn more.
She then called a meeting to thank her team members for their feedback, express her remorse, and share her plan for remedying the situation.
By being proactive, Sabina could gain critical feedback for her improvement as a leader and nip her team’s growing dissatisfaction before it escalated further.
Even if you are not in a leadership position, you can make an effort to reach out to those impacted by your actions, hear them out, and share a plan for improvement moving forward.

Offer an apology

Offer a genuine and humble apology, acknowledging your error and the harm you caused to the other person, team, or business.
Don’t be defensive or make an apology about yourself.
What other people care about is your impact, not your intent.
For instance, suppose a colleague tells you they were offended by a comment you made.
Don’t respond by saying, “Well, I would never offend anyone on purpose!” or “I am sorry if you feel that way.”
Using the word “if” in your apology implies the other person is being irrational or overly sensitive.
It does not show any ownership of your wrongdoing.
Instead, fully own your mistake. Instead, say, “I appreciate you telling me that. I am sorry that what I said was offensive and hurtful to you. I’ll be more mindful.”

Make amends with those impacted.

While it is an act of integrity and accountability to admit and apologise for your error, you will only rebuild trust if you correct the behaviour or issue.
Share what you learned and how it will be different, and commit to doing better.
(“I’m sorry. I thought it was okay to attend the call virtually from my desk. I didn’t realise everyone was expected to be in the conference room. I’ll be there from the next meeting.”)
You may need to work hard to change your behaviour and correct the situation.
But without the correction, any apology is worthless, and people will grow more cynical.
Returning to Sabina’s example, she improved her team leadership by deliberately practising new communication and delegation approaches.
Rather than proactively explaining things and providing solutions when trying to help her team members solve problems (two habits her direct reports found condescending), she committed to asking questions.
If she weren’t sure that her reports were following what she was talking about, she would ask, “Are you familiar with this?” before explaining further.
And instead of doling out unsolicited advice, she would ask: “How can I help?” Further, she followed up monthly with her direct reports to solicit their ongoing feedback in these areas.

Show your boss that you are making progress.

Unfortunately, the negatives outweigh the positives in our minds, meaning people remember your faults more than your strengths.
This negativity bias means it’s essential to take action and not shrink back after making a mistake.
Find ways to position yourself in front of people and demonstrate progress on the issue to rebuild trust and shift perceptions.
For example, Jared, an employee at a technology company I work with, learned in his annual review that he was failing to scale his organisation the way his manager expected.
His boss saw him as being in the weeds and creating churn versus enabling his teams to work more efficiently.
To improve his performance and overcome this perception, Jared created and mapped out a detailed plan, including steps and deadlines he planned to reach to accomplish his goals.
Importantly, he updated his boss bi-weekly to give her visibility into his progress and counter her potential confirmation bias.
It takes time to rebuild trust and reset perceptions, so be patient.
Maintain hope and persist in your efforts over time, and you will prevail.
As one CEO I interviewed on the leadership brand shared, “I love people who have had a bump in the road, who have failed and learned.
They now have a tolerance for failure, strengthening their character.”

Have compassion

When we have a setback at work, it can be uncomfortable, and we can become excessively self-critical.
Berating ourselves for something in the past is not helpful.
We can learn much from our mistakes and use them to catalyse our development, so long as we don’t focus our energy on criticising ourselves.
When you unintentionally err, treat yourself as you would a friend in a similar situation.
Among its many proven benefits, practising self-compassion will support you in regaining clarity and confidence and moving forward productively from a setback.
To ensure you make your mistake a valuable learning experience, also ask yourself these two questions:

How can I prevent this from happening again in the future?

What’s one lesson I can extract from this experience?
Similarly, show compassion for others when they stumble. Likely, they feel embarrassed and already rebuking themselves enough for their error.
Don’t add to the negative emotions they already feel.
This is especially true regarding remote hires, whose onboarding was likely compromised by the circumstances.
The excellent news is that self-compassion and compassion for others are connected.
When you practice one, you naturally boost the other and contribute to an upward cycle of compassion at work, the order of the day if there ever was one.

Here are some steps to get over any mistake that happens at work

Keep Things in Perspective

It can be challenging to maintain a sense of perspective when you’re upset with yourself, but try to ensure your emotional response is proportional to your blunder.
With few exceptions—like if you’re a pilot, surgeon, or military personnel—making an error at work is not a life-or-death situation, and most mistakes can be resolved or corrected immediately.
So you uploaded the wrong file, double-booked a crucial meeting, showed up late for a presentation, or included a typo in a critical report.
You’re alive.
No one was mortally wounded.
This is a parking ticket, not a multiple-car pile-up on the freeway of life.
A professional copywriter friend said, “I love my work because nobody dies if I’m not witty enough with a tagline.
I do my best, but ultimately, it’s words on a page or a screen. It’s not life or death!”

Confront Your Worst-Case Scenario—Then Let it Go.

In life, there certainly are consequences for mistakes. But sometimes, your mind exaggerates and distorts the potential results of your mistake, sending you into a state of agony and stressing you out, which, ironically, can cause you to make more errors in the future.
It can be helpful to confront your worst-case scenario—whatever that may be—so that you can make peace with it and move on.
You might say to yourself, “OK, I goofed up. And you know what? Maybe I will get fired.
It’s doubtful because it’s very costly and time-intensive for employers to replace great employees, and I usually do a terrific job.
But if that happens? I will survive.
I am resourceful and creative and won’t let anything—not even a job loss—derail my life, health, or happiness.”

Create a Game Plan for Next Time

Evaluate what you need to do differently next time to ensure this same mistake doesn’t happen again.
Were you multi-tasking beyond your ability, with dozens of tabs open on your browser? Were you rushing too fast to hit a deadline, missing essential details in the process?
If you find an issue that you can address, do so.
And for extra measure, if you feel it would be beneficial to tell your boss about how you will prevent mistakes in the future, do that, too.

Earn Back Trust Through Your Actions—Not Just Your Words

Delivering great work consistently is the best way to earn people’s trust and admiration.
Do that, and occasional bouts of forgetfulness or slip-ups here and there are likely to be quickly forgiven—and forgotten.
Bottom line: One mistake—even a big one—does not have to derail your life or career.
Ever heard of Akio Morita? His first invention was a terrible rice cooker that burned rice, which no one wanted.
He sold less than 100 of them.
That mistake didn’t stop him from trying to improve, though. Eventually, he kept working, and his little gadget company—Sony—became a household name.

Conclusion:

Remember that mistakes and setbacks are normal, and failure offers us an opportunity to learn.
Don’t duck, cover, and self-flagellate if you mess up at work. Instead, use the strategies above to remedy the situation, rebuild trust, and repair your reputation.
You can fail—even publicly and dramatically—and still reinvent yourself, move past the mistake, and create a rich, unique, successful life.
So, if you’re still mentally thrashing yourself about the document you forgot to attach to
that email the other week, let it go. You are going to be just fine. And this is what to do when you make mistakes at work.

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