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The art of owning your mistakes
August 24, 2023
Mistakes. I’ve made a few.
But haven’t we all? Whether you’re the most junior team member or CEO, a start-up or global brand, everyone gets things wrong sometimes. As human beings, we’re fallible, mistakes are destined to happen.
I will raise my hand high and admit that I have made many unnecessary mistakes in my personal and professional life, and as a ‘perfectionist’ these flaws are engrained in my brain as vivid memories.
While interning, I got the multiple numbers of SKUs in a box wrong and accidentally ordered £10,000s of product from our warehouse to the London office (it even got signed off by senior management). When I realised my mistake, I entered panic mode; my heart was racing as I tried to rapidly reverse my wrongdoings. The whole team scrambled to cancel the order, which thankfully was successful. I thought the world was ending but it was an easy mistake to make.
Today, especially with evolving digital communications, our focus is often on what brands are doing – and what they say is wide reaching. So, when one of HBO’s interns made a blunder by sending a test email meant for the internal team to its whole subscriber database, a lot of people witnessed their mistake.
But what HBO did, was the corporate equivalent of my team members rushing to cancel my box over-order. The HBO social account made a public service announcement revealing it was the intern and that it was supporting them through this error. It triggered a hashtag trend #DearIntern, where professionals across a range of industries showed solidarity with the HBO intern and shared their workplace hiccups. This thread of thousands of stories showed people they were not alone in their own mini – or major – downfalls.
More recently, the Coutts Bank and Nigel Farage scandal made the headlines. The CEO of the NatWest group (which owns Coutts Bank), Dame Alison Rose, resigned after confessing she made a “serious error of judgment” after breaking client confidentiality by answering questions about the closure of Farage’s account, with BBC Business Editor, Simon Jack. This case raised interesting questions about owning one’s mistakes and how those mistakes are dealt with. In an era where seemingly endless politicians and many business leaders refuse to resign no matter what the transgression, one of only 35% of women at the senior management level within the financial services industry in Britain proved a rare case of mea culpa. Rose publicly owned up to her mistakes by stepping down from her distinguished career at NatWest where she had worked her way up from graduate trainee to CEO.
So, while most of us will never be faced with those CEO-scale dilemmas, we will make more small-scale mistakes. Here are my top tips on how to cope with it positively.
Own it
Don’t hide, no matter how scared you may feel. Time is of the essence – so immediately tell your manager or the person it directly affects. This way they will help come up with the best solution for how to deal with the situation. Trying to hide a mistake, or avoid owning up to it, invariably makes it worse in the long run.
Seek support
It’s an uncomfortable feeling knowing you have messed up. Speak to family and friends, they will give you the reassurance you need and often help by sharing worse examples and valuable context to make you realise it’s not the end of the world.
Learn from the experience
Reflect on why and how you made the error, this way you can put the appropriate measures in place to ensure it won’t happen again and save you from further heartache. In the words of George Clooney: “Failure teaches you everything, you learn nothing from success”.
Leanne Moore