Recovering From Mistakes at Work

Mistakes happen at work and this doesn’t mean that your career is over. It only means that you need to tweak your working style and build on your current skills so you can achieve better results. Mistakes are often associated with lack of competency when in fact, they are learning experiences that allow you grow and thrive in your job. A setback might actually be good for you; it will force you to question what you really want and will allow you to better understand your strengths and weaknesses. My Career Success is here to show you how to recover from mistakes in a positive way.

Take Responsibility

Many employees find it hard to own up to their mistakes. But trying to cover up your failures with a false sense of righteousness or by shifting the blame on others doesn’t pay off. Don’t shy away from taking responsibility when things go wrong. Owning up to your mistakes only shows how mature you are. Discuss what you’re going to do differently in the future, which demonstrates what you’ve learned from this incident.

Be Solution-Oriented

Spending time obsessing over your mistakes can stand in the way of your productivity and success on the job. Instead of dwelling on the negatives of the situation, you need to focus on finding solutions. Being solution-oriented is all about turning a negative into a positive. It doesn’t mean that you should go through life with your eyes shut on anything that goes wrong; you just refuse to focus on the things that you have no control over and try to fix what can be fixed. You need to tap into all necessary resources and to continuously try to find other options. Always remember that being consistent is important to make progress.

Rebuilding your Manager’s Trust

Rebuilding the trust of your boss after a big mistake might seem hard. But you need to take initiative to prove that you can still handle the job. With commitment and hard work, you can position yourself as the employee who knows how to bounce back when something goes wrong. Once you start working on a similar task in the future, make sure that you keep your manager in the loop so that he’s knows that you have learned your lesson. If you want to strengthen your relationship with your boss, you need to maintain integrity at all times. Integrity is all about keeping your promises and telling the truth no matter how difficult the situation might be.

It’s a Learning Experience

They say that the day you stop learning is the day you are dead. Smart employees understand that mistakes are learning experiences. So don’t overcomplicate things by obsessing over what went wrong; the solution is to simplify.  Keep in mind that you chose a path that you thought it would work and you gave it a try.  Even if you failed, take a lesson from this incident and move on to the next project. What you need to understand is that mistakes are not failures, they simply help you eliminate the ways that don’t work in order to come closer to the ways that will.