Making Mistakes Meaningful (Not Maddening)

Mistakes happen.  And when they do you have an opportunity.  You can make the mistake meaningful or maddening.  The choice is yours.  How you handle the outcome of a mistake, whether your own mistake or someone else’s, provides insight to the kind of person you are.  If you are leading in an organization it can help communicate what kind of organization it is.

Here are seven tips for making mistakes meaningful instead of maddening:

Take responsibility – When a mistake does happen, own it.  Apologize.  Take responsibility to make it right.  This will set an example for others.  Allow and encourage employees to own their mistakes.  Do not let them off the hook by jumping in and “saving them”.  Coach them on how to apologize.  Allow them to be responsible for correcting the situation.

Do not point fingers or blame– Pointing fingers, even if it clearly is not your fault, sends a message that you are not willing to take responsibility.  These are the leaders who are unceremoniously called “Teflon”.  Nothing sticks to them.  The act of pointing fingers and blaming others decreases morale.  It puts time and energy in a negative and unproductive place.  This can be maddening. 

Do not make excuses – It is so easy to create multiple excuses for why the mistake happened.  Like pointing fingers, the use of excuses can wear on your character as well as the morale of your team.  It can be easy to get caught up in identifying the reasoning for why something happened instead of trying to figure out how to fix it.  Much energy can be spent on excuses instead of solutions.  This can also be maddening. The less blaming and making excuses are done, the more meaningful you can make a mistake.

Stay objective – Stick to the facts in identifying a mistake has been made.  Objectivity supports emotional intelligence.  Staying objective makes it more about the actions and the results and less about the individual(s) personally.  It is easier to make a mistake meaningful when we are not taking it personally or making others feel like the mistake is a personal flaw in their character.

Focus on the solution not the problem – Once a mistake is made, it is done.  Unless you have the ability to travel back in time and correct it, energy should be spent on moving forward and solving the problem.  If you are coaching an employee who has made a mistake, acknowledge that the mistake happened.  Agree that you will not continue to promote the problem by lingering on why or how for too long.  Instead, you will turn your energies toward identifying a solution.  Problem promoting is maddening.  Solution solving is meaningful.

Encourage learning – Hindsight is 20/20.  Take the time to identify how you would handle this same instance should it ever happen again.  Ask this of your teams as well.  Use mistakes in a meaningful way to improve processes so the mistakes never happen twice.  When you or your team does not take the time to learn from mistakes they will be repeated.  That is maddening.

Embrace mistakes – When mistakes happen spend less time getting angry about it and more time thanking yourself or whomever created the mistake for providing the opportunity to learn.  When we approach mistakes like they are a headache, a nuisance or hassle and get angry and frustrated we are doing just the opposite of embracing.  We are sending a signal that this action is unwanted.  Employees will be more apprehensive about revealing a mistake if they don’t feel it will be embraced.

When we dwell on the misfortune, point fingers, make excuses, linger on the problem, and make it personal, mistakes are sure to be maddening.   They do not have to be.  As author Richard Bach once said, “There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go.”  Mistakes can be meaningful.