Everybody screws up. We all make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect. He meant well. Not enough experience. It was an oversight. TMI – just got confused. We have all heard this before and we are all, from time to time, guilty as charged. Anyone that denies it, quite frankly is full of crap and worse full of themselves. Nobody can always be right.
Fundamentally, when we mess up – we need to see it as, what I refer to as an ‘experience teacher’. Clearly, if processed and handled properly, these can be the best lessons to learn from. You can sit in a class room, a board room, an office, a studio – doesn’t matter where you sit, you are going to be tasked with something that just gets in the way and you will make a mistake. The thing you want to do is learn from it and make sure you don’t do it again. Give thought to what you did and try and understand the mistake. Don’t minimize it – take action and hopefully you have a teacher, mentor, direct report, boss, supervisor, manager that doesn’t get stuck on ‘fault’ and is more interested in processing with you to get an understanding where the disconnect is/was and discuss it.
That is the true sign, by the way, of good leadership.
If you can have a conversation and really get to the root cause of the mistake – you are on your way to a valuable learning experience where you can develop a mutual understanding and trust. That makes the moving forward part easy. You established a common ground. In the work place, there is no way to define how valuable that is. It’s an awareness, it’s one of the intangibles that people are aware of – but don’t always know how to articulate. Establish that by being forthright. Make a mistake – take the responsibility for it, acknowledge it and deal with it immediately. You will earn respect. Maturity is a lesson in improvement and productivity.
You don’t lose – you learn.