We’ve all been there: that horrifying moment when you realise you’ve messed up – big time. After you pick yourself up off the floor, how should you respond? Here are five steps to fix a mistake at work.
The first thing that goes through your mind is “Oh dear god, no!”. The next is, “I wonder if I can get a one-way flight to Machu Picchu in the next five minutes to start my new life as a llama farmer?”. You’ve made a blunder at work – and it’s a whopper. Everyone makes a mistake at work, but this isn’t one of those everyday oopsies. Maybe you’ve cost your employer thousands of dollars, destroyed a month’s worth of work, or accidentally hit send on an inappropriate email to your boss.
Your first instinct is to run and hide – but we all know that sooner or later, you’re going to have to face the music. Besides, it’s almost a sure thing that, no matter how angry, your manager will spit at you less than a herd of llamas would.
Now, it’s all about how you handle the situation and minimise the damage done to your company, reputation and relationships.
Don’t panic
After you’ve calmed down from the initial adrenaline rush, take some deep breaths and devise your plan of action: figure out who you need to tell, what some solutions to the problem are, why the mistake happened and what systems can be put in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
Whatever you do, don’t go running around the building begging for people’s help. It may seem to you that you are displaying how much you care, but to everyone else you’ll seem like an (annoying) hot mess. If you fall to pieces, it will demonstrate to your manager that you can’t handle pressure and are useless in a crises.
Have solutions
Before you tell your manager or boss, brainstorm how you can approach the problem. As Patrick Allen from Lifehack recommends, having a few solutions to the problem at the ready can stop the hammer from coming down on you too hard.
Additionally, you may be able to devise a quick fix and discover that the situation is not as dire as you first thought.
And, as Ashley Cobert writes for The Muse, it’s always better to be known as someone who can clean up their own mess, rather than relying on others to do it for them.
“The less time you spend hemming and hawing and the more quickly you fix the mistake, the more your boss will see you as someone who does well under pressure and cares about the success of the company,” she writes.
Acknowledge what happened and why it happened
Work out who needs to know, eat some humble pie and tell them. The biggest blunder you can make here is trying to hush up your mistake at work. If your manager finds out without you telling them, it is going to reflect very poorly on you.
In an interview with the Harvard Business Review, Toyota Chairman Katsuaki Watanabe explains why it’s best to get problems out in the open:
“Hidden problems are the ones that become serious threats eventually. If problems are revealed for everybody to see, I will feel reassured. Because once problems have been visualised, even if our people didn’t notice them earlier, they will rack their brains to find solutions to them,” he said.
In a post on making a big mistake at work, Alison Green from Ask a Manager gives some advice on how to handle this tough conversation:
“Make it clear that you understand what a huge mistake this was, what the potential impact could be and how serious the situation is. Say that you’re mortified that it happened. Explain – briefly, and not defensively – where you went wrong and what steps you’re taking to avoid it ever happening again,” Green writes.
As a manager, Green says there are three important things she wants to know when someone makes a major mistake at work:
- That they understand that the mistake was truly serious and what the impact could be.
- How it happened, and that they understand how it happened (two different things).
- What steps they’re taking to ensure nothing similar happens again.
Green adds: “If the person makes all of this clear on their own, there’s not a whole lot left for me to do. I don’t need to impress upon them the seriousness of the mistake (which is an unpleasant conversation) if they’ve already made it clear that they get that. I don’t need to put systems in place to prevent against it in the future if they’ve already taken care of it.”
Own the consequences
Be willing to accept the fallout from your mistake, and accept it gracefully. Adrian Granzella Larssen, editor in chief of The Daily Muse, recommends that whatever you have to do to make things right, do it, and do it without complaining.
“It’ll show everyone around you you’re taking your mistake at work seriously – and frankly, it’s probably a small price to pay for keeping your job,” she writes. “Depending on the blunder, accepting the consequences could mean different things. Maybe you have to make an hour-long drive for an uncomfortable meeting to smooth things over with a client. Maybe you have to work 20 hours of overtime to recreate the file you deleted off the company’s shared drive.”
You may need to work hard to regain your managers trust; but it will happen, eventually.
A secondary, more subtle repercussion might be increased scrutiny – at least for a couple of months. Just deal with it, at least for as long as is reasonable, Larssen says.
“You need to hunker down and do your best work. Arrive early. Stay late. Go above and beyond. Be positive. Make every cliché you’ve ever heard about shining in the office your personal mantra. Talk is cheap, and you really need to show everyone around you that you’re ready to move past your blunder in a positive way for them to believe you,” she writes.
Forgive yourself
Once you’ve done what you can to fix your mistake at work, there’s no point continuing to self-flagellate indefinitely. You’ve learned your lesson, you’ve put systems in place to make sure the same mistake doesn’t happen again, and you’ve proven to your manager that you can handle a crisis – there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
As Steven Tobak from Inc. says:
“Jazz great Miles Davis once said, ‘When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that makes it good or bad.’ To this day, I marvel at the wisdom behind that simple notion. If you just add a little self-confidence and courage, it’s all you need to recover from even the worst blunders, career or otherwise.”