Don’t We All Make Mistakes?

Mistakes, we all make them and when we make them in the workplace it can be embarrassing and stressful. Here are a few tips for handling mistakes and using them to help you grow both personally and professionally.

Acknowledge and accept responsibility for your mistake

There’s no point in trying to hide it, especially if other people will be affected by your mistake. Before you can learn from your mistakes, you have to accept full responsibility for your role in the outcome. Be honest, own it, apologize, and start working to rectify the problem immediately.

Take a step back to evaluate

Dwelling on past mistakes can be counterproductive but you can’t learn from them without taking a step back to assess yourself and the situation. Start from the beginning to find where the mistake/problem originated and work up to present day to find what may be adjusted to prevent this from happening in the future.

What exactly went wrong? Was there a way to prevent this from happening? How can I change my process to prevent this from happening in the future?

All excellent questions to consider that will help you turn your mistake into a lesson learned.

Come up with a plan

When in the moment, it can sometimes be hard to see where we could have changed things to provide a better outcome. After taking a step back to evaluate come up with a plan that will make it harder for that mistake to happen again. By creating a plan to be proactive to you are proving you are responsible, can be trusted, and are willing to learn from your mistakes in order to better not only yourself, but the company as well.