Jan Schulz-Hofen on November 26, 2024 The best way to handle making mistakes at work
Deep down, we all know that it’s OK to make mistakes — but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still hurt in the moment after you realized you’ve messed up on a project or task.
No one’s perfect, yet it’s all-too-common to try to hide or deny our mistakes. But here’s the reality: every mistake is an opportunity to learn and grow. As Richard Branson famously said:
“One thing is certain in business: you will make mistakes. When you are pushing the boundaries, mistakes are inevitable - how you react is important.”
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Rather than hiding away from our mistakes, learning how to accept, react, and learn from them in the right way is a superpower that few people master.
Why you’re so afraid of making mistakes at work
No matter how experienced, intelligent, or qualified you are, everyone makes mistakes at some point in their lives.
But unfortunately, knowing that doesn’t make it hurt any less when they happen, with feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment, and frustration washing over us in those moments.
This is especially true when making mistakes at work.
For many people, their career forms a big part of their identities, providing a sense of purpose, fulfillment, and a way to support loved ones. So, when we mess up during the workday, it cuts especially deep.
Given there’s no way of avoiding mistakes, it’s important to recognize why we’re so afraid of making them.
In my experience, there are a few specific reasons that make it especially difficult to accept making mistakes at work:
- You want to be seen as competent and talented. Mistakes can make you feel like you’ve let those around you down. You were hired to do a job, and it hurts when you mess up or do something that inadvertently harms your team, manager, or the wider company.
- You struggle with perfectionism. Not only do we hate making mistakes, but many of us falsely believe we need to be perfect in everything that we do. While perfectionism can also be harmful in other ways (such as reducing productivity), mistakes can be especially difficult to process if you’re striving for perfection.
- You’re worried about the safety of your position. Jobs provide financial security and in the moment of making a mistake our minds jump to the worst possible outcome: being fired. While this is extremely unlikely, it’s only human to catastrophize even the smallest of mistakes.
- Your job makes up a large part of your personal identity. Alongside the financial security, for many people their job represents a massive part of who they are and what they stand for. These people take extra pride and care in their jobs, with mistakes feeling disproportionately upsetting when they occur.
- Links to anxiety, fear, and mental health. At its most extreme, Atelophobia (the fear of making mistakes) can actually have a big impact on our mental health. Given the importance many people place on their jobs, even the smallest of workplace mistakes can lead to extreme anxiety and depression.
Recognizing why we’re scared makes the initial disappointment easier to process, allowing us to focus our energy on how to react to them in the right way instead.
When you can overcome negative feelings faster, you can focus on getting back on track and learning from the experience rather than beating yourself up over it.
The truth: What leaders are really think about you messing up
One of the biggest reasons we’re scared of making mistakes is because we fear the reaction of the leaders and managers around us. Put simply, we’re scared they’ll think less of us, viewing us as incompetent, untrustworthy, and unreliable.
Sure, there will always be leaders and managers who blow up over the tiniest mistake, but in the majority of instances, leaders care more about what happens next.
In my time as CEO of Planio, I’ve come to learn that leaders must use a top-down approach to create a safe environment and an error culture where making mistakes is okay and people don’t fear negative repercussions.
There is a balance to strike though. If founders and managers tend to help fix mistakes or fix mistakes themselves, then team members might get the impression that quality and accuracy don’t matter as much – which will create further problems down the line.
It must be clear that owning mistakes is encouraged and fixing them should always be the shared responsibility of the person causing them.
After all, the best leaders know that mistakes are part of life, and are more concerned with seeing their employees:
- Own up. Leaders want to see their employees own up to their mistakes, rather than trying to hide them away. Acknowledging mistakes quickly shows qualities such as bravery, humility, and honesty, all of which are essential for inspiring teams and building a great culture.
- Take responsibility. While most leaders know that mistakes are part of life, they want to see impacts managed quickly and effectively. Specifically, they want to see their employees take responsibility for correcting their mistakes themselves, rather than handing the problem off to someone else to fix on their behalf.
- Learn lessons. Once a mistake is fixed and everyone has moved on, leaders want to know the same mistake isn’t going to happen again. If you can learn from your mistakes to improve your performance moving forwards, there’s a good chance your reputation will actually improve off the back of the mistake you’ve made.
Ultimately, understanding it’s OK to make mistakes is only the first step. It’s what you do next that matters most.
How to handle making mistakes at work — the right way
So, you’ve made a mistake at work, and you’re beginning to panic. To protect your mental well-being and minimize the impact of your mistake, follow these six steps to help you manage it in the right way.
Take a moment to breathe
When you first make a mistake, the easiest thing to do is panic. Whether it’s shame, guilt, embarrassment, frustration, or fear, it’s easy to react emotionally, which often leads to you making another mistake straight away.
“The real test is not whether you avoid this failure, because you won’t. It’s whether you let it harden or shame you into inaction, or whether you learn from it; whether you choose to persevere.” - Barack Obama
Instead, when you first make a mistake, pause for a moment to take a breath. This will help you:
- Get your emotions under control. Breathing helps to control your initial panic and stops you heading into a spiral of anxiety or uncertainty. It will also help you keep calm under pressure, putting you in a better place to take positive next steps.
- Keep things in perspective. While the mistake will feel big in the moment, in the grand scheme of things it’s likely to be a drop in the ocean. Take a moment to step back from the situation to realize that your mistake isn’t actually the end of the world.
Here’s a real life example from our work at Planio:
A colleague of mine — let’s call him Hans — works as a DevOps engineer and developer here at Planio. Like all our employees, he’s a seasoned engineer with many years of experience under his belt. Recently, he was tasked with performing a rolling upgrade on our customer databases.
Like all operations of this kind, the upgrade was scripted and its rollout was tested on a staging environment containing sample data. However, as the live upgrade starts rolling through our actual Planio customer databases, our monitoring system suddenly starts pinging our engineer’s phones with failure alerts: Planio Search stopped working and some customers are seeing error messages instead of search results.
Hans feels a sudden adrenaline rush kicking in. But rather than panic, he decides to abort the rolling upgrade, takes a moment to compose himself, and assesses the situation.
Raise the mistake with the right person
The worst thing you can do is try to hide a mistake. This inevitably leads to others finding out in the wrong way, with a lack of team awareness often leading to further mistakes. That said, you don’t want to simply broadcast the mistake to everyone, as this might create unnecessary panic or concern.
Raise the mistake to the people who:
- Are impacted by the mistake. Make these people aware to help ensure everyone is aligned and no one finds out in the wrong way. This can also reduce the chances of further mistakes being made.
- Can help correct the mistake. These people are going to become your allies moving forwards. Whether it’s helping to calm project stakeholders, designing a technical fix, or simply offering moral support, share mistakes with people who can support you as you clean up the fallout.
What this could look like in real life:
Hans immediately called me to explain the situation and ask if I could help him with a resolution. We have standard procedures for service outages and technical failures, and the steps always involve restoring services in a timely manner as well as constant communication with the affected clients.
Understand the mistake and its consequences
Now that you’re composed, and the mistake is out in the open, it’s time to start managing the impacts.
“Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.” - Oscar Wilde
This begins by fully understanding the mistake that’s been made and any impact it might have on those around you. To achieve this, consider:
- The type of mistake. This article from Harvard Business Review discusses the common types of mistakes we make, from small ‘aha moments’ to high-stakes errors. Recognize where your mistake falls to help plan your response.
- The impacts of the mistake. While you don’t need to go into great detail, consider who, where, how, and what the mistake impacts. For example, consider which teams are impacted, the technologies it might affect, and what the impact might be on your organization (e.g. financial, reputational, etc).
What this could look like in real life:
Together, Hans and I quickly realized that the upgrade resulted in a database column not being large enough for some full-text document excerpts, and therefore some index data being discarded causing search queries to show server errors.
Luckily, only the customers whose databases had already been processed in the rolling upgrade were affected, and Hans’ early stopping of the migration limited the damage to those few and not all Planio clients.
Brainstorm solutions
Now it’s time to get back on the front foot and come up with some solutions to correct the mistakes that you’ve made.
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” - Henry Ford
The key here is that you must take responsibility for finding and implementing a solution, not passing the problem to someone else.
During this process:
- Create an action plan. Once you’ve brainstormed solutions with the team, create an action plan that includes all the steps needed to solve the problem. If the mistake is large, it may even need a complete project plan, involving multiple stakeholders and team members to solve it correctly.
- Realize there might not be a solution. With some mistakes, there might not be a solution — and that’s ok. For foot-in-mouth mistakes or ‘aha moments’ an apology might be all that’s required before moving on with your day.
What this could look like in real life:
While Hans started working on a scripted index restore from our backups, I sent a quick email to affected clients, informing them of the situation and reassuring them that we’re already working on a resolution, and that no data had been lost due to the multiple redundant backups we always keep at Planio.
Take action
With an action plan agreed, it’s time to rectify the mistake as quickly and effectively as possible. Remember, most leaders won’t be mad that you’ve made a mistake, but they’ll expect you to manage the impact, so put your full energy into following through on your action plan.
Specifically, focus on:
- Clear communications. When rectifying mistakes, it’s important to communicate clearly with everyone involved. Pair your action plan with a lightweight communication plan to ensure everyone knows what’s happened and what you’re doing to fix the error.
- Taking care of yourself. While taking action is a great way to overcome the negative feelings of a mistake, fixing problems can be daunting and stressful. Take time to focus on your well-being to avoid conflicts, remain calm, and prevent burnout.
What this could look like in real life:
Subscribers using our Service Level Agreement were due a monetary refund due to the data unavailability, so I processed those right away to make sure we’re keeping our contractual obligations.
By the end of the work day, Hans had finished restoring the backups. We finished the work day by usual COB and in good spirits, and we scheduled a planned maintenance downtime window for the coming Saturday night (a time when most Planio customers are not accessing the platform, and a maintenance window has the least impact) to re-index the data that had been changed in between the occurrence of the error and the backup restore.
It was clear that Hans would conduct the maintenance on Saturday night, putting in extra hours on his weekend. I didn’t have to ask for it, as he suggested it himself, and I was glad he owned his mistake and went all the way to fixing it.
Capture lessons learned to minimize future mistakes
The only bad mistake is one you don’t learn from. In that vein, take the time to analyze the situation, what could have been done differently, and how effective the recovery plan was. Then, put measures in place to stop it from happening again.
A project management tool like Planio is essential for capturing lessons learned.
Not only does Planio help you document and communicate mistakes across the team, but the built-in Wiki and Knowledge Base features serve as a powerful repository for future projects, ensuring key knowledge isn’t lost when the project ends.
What this could look like in real life:
In the aftermath, Hans and I wrote a detailed “post mortem” document in our internal Planio Wiki for future reference. The reason the problem didn’t surface in automated testing before the rollout was that our test data only contained short “lorem ipsum” texts in the affected database columns for which the space was enough.
As part of hardening our testing framework, we made sure that test data is larger and therefore more akin to actual customer input in Planio. I also made a note of the required effort caused by the mistake measured in internal unbillable hours as well as the monetary damage due to the SLA penalties we had to pay out.
What to do if you can’t let go of a mistake
While you can take action to correct a mistake, sometimes it can be difficult to truly move on. If this sounds like you, you might be stuck in a thinking trap.
A thinking trap, also known as a cognitive distortion, is where our mind convinces us of something that’s completely untrue. You can learn more about thinking traps here, but here are the three most common ones you’ll likely deal with (and what to do about them):
- Filtering. This is where you only pay attention to the negative aspects of a mistake while ignoring any of the positives that came from the situation. To overcome this, focus on your lessons learned and ask for positive feedback from managers and leaders on how you dealt with the situation.
- Emotional reasoning. This is where we take our emotions of a mistake and project them as the objective truth. To overcome this, try asking others what they thought of the mistake. Chances are, it’s nowhere near as frustrating, embarrassing, or impactful as you experienced it in your mind.
- Fortune-telling. Based on previous experience, we predict that future situations will always turn out negatively. To overcome this, look at the actions you’ve put in place from your lessons learned. These are specifically designed to stop the mistake happening again, so there’s a good chance you’ll have better results in the future.
Final thought: How managers can handle employees making mistakes
Mistakes are part of being human. But while we all know deep down that it’s ok to make mistakes, it doesn’t make them hurt any less.
Given the inevitability of messing up, it’s better to focus our energy on reacting and learning from mistakes rather than fearing them. With a broader perspective, fast action, and lessons learned, there are numerous positives that can be drawn from a seemingly negative situation. If you’re a manager working to support a team member who has made a mistake, try using these techniques:
- Don’t react emotionally. While you might have personal feelings about the mistake, the worst thing you can do is react strongly without thinking. Take time to consider the employee, their well-being, and even their track record, before jumping into a rash reaction that might make the situation far worse.
- Help them get context. When people make mistakes, it’s easy to catastrophize and start to panic. As a manager, be there to support your team members by providing them context, re-assuring them that the worst isn’t going to happen, and that you’re there to support them through the process.
- Mandate responsibility. While you’re there to support, this has to be balanced. While it may feel like tough love at the moment, you must be strong and ensure the team member takes responsibility for correcting their mistake and doesn’t try to hand it off to others. After all, taking responsibility is a key characteristic of great project managers.
Lastly, make sure everyone learns from the mistake. Mistakes are great learning opportunities, and as a manager, it’s your job to ensure everyone learns from the error.
Using tools like Planio helps with this by providing a single location to document and communicate lessons learned. This is great for both current and future team members to learn from mistakes and improve their performance moving forwards!
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