What to do when you make a mistake at work

Taking pride in your work is great, and no one wants to let the team down. But mistakes happen and even the most successful people have got things wrong from time-to-time. This means that, as serious as it might seem right now, it’s important to try and keep things in perspective.

We’re not saying that you shouldn’t allow yourself to feel bad for a moment, this is an important part of processing what happened, but you shouldn’t allow what happened to consume all of your mental capacity. This is especially true when you leave work. Even when things are going well, you shouldn’t be taking work home with you, and when you’ve got a negative shadow hanging over you, it’s even more important that you have time to switch off.

Perhaps even worse than taking things too much to heart, is trying to pretend you didn’t do anything wrong, or burying what happened. Given that it’s highly unlikely that only you have oversight on what you’re working on, there’s a good chance that any attempt to sweep your mistake under the rug will fail.

At best, you look untrustworthy and like a poor team player. At worst, it could make an already tricky situation even worse for you and your career. That’s why it’s important to be honest about what happened and accept responsibility. We’re not saying this will mean you get off scot-free, but it’s a lot better than trying to keep it secret.

When you’re feeling guilty about something, it’s easy to start really beating yourself up and apologising way more than you need to. Ultimately, when you decide who you need to tell what they’re going to want to hear is what happened, that you’re taking responsibility for it and that you have a plan to put it right. Most importantly, you need to avoid:

• Making excuses: this isn’t a good look, and means it looks like you aren’t taking responsibility in the first place.
• Blaming other people: this is even worse than making excuses for yourself. All modern day businesses try to operate as a team, and throwing your colleagues under the bus is the furthest you can get from being a good team player.
• Beating yourself up: you might think that doing this will show that you’re real.
  

Once you’ve corrected the mistake, you’re going to want to prove (both to yourself and those around you) that it was only a temporary blip.

Our advice? Don’t push it. You don’t need to suddenly put heaps of pressure on yourself to perform exponentially better. In fact, doing this is likely to end up with you making another mistake, because you’re trying too hard.

Really, the best thing you can do is settle back into your normal routine, and return to consistently delivering high quality work on a regular basis.