Okay you’ve screwed up at the office, guess what, so has everyone else. It happens! But you can’t sweep your mistakes under the rug because ignoring things make everything worse. Except for my fiddle leaf fig, I think it thrives on me ignoring it and then giving it a cup of water when I think it’s going to die. Anyway let’s talk about how to come back from making mistakes at work.
When I was in my first year of my career I made one of the forehead smacking mistakes – the reply to the wrong person on email. *yes smack my forehead* I forwarded an email from K to G and said something exasperated about what was sent to me. Well I didn’t forward it to G, I actually replied to K. UGGGGHHHH. I felt awful. I mean AWFUL. And I knew that K felt bad because of what I said too – great, now I’m even more of a terrible person.
Well there were steps I took to do damage control and rectify the situation. They’re easy to do in every situation that you make a mistake at work. Edit or add to the steps as your mistake calls for.
Recover from making mistakes at work
Start these steps as soon as possible. Get moving immediatly. The longer you wait the worse the backlash gets. Honestly, I only gave myself about 10 minutes between when I figured out I sent the email to the wrong person and when I was leaving my office to apologize and that time should have been two minutes. Get started on the recovery right away. It’s also less time to stress about it.
Look, it might be a bitter pill to swallow but this is your fault. Not someone else’s, not the internet’s, not the *sshole from four offices down. It’s on you and you need to take ownership of the actions you took. When you take responsibility for your actions you gain the ability to fix them.
Okay depending on you, either taking responsibility or this step: apologizing is going to sting the most. For me it’s this one because I have to take responsibility out loud! But you need to apologize to whomever was wronged in your mistake. Maybe it was a colleague you wrote the email to, your boss who had an expectation of something you were supposed to handle, or the client who had a deadline. In any situation there is someone who has been inconvenienced by your actions and you need to get in touch with them and apologize.
Do what you need to do to fix the situation. In my email situation the apology was the fix; in other situations you’re going to have to take other steps. You might need to stay late, work overtime, or do extra work but it needs to be done. Some situations don’t have a fix but you can still do damage control.
Take review of what you need to do to make sure that this mistake doesn’t happen again. Do you need to create reminders? Write the body of the email before you enter the recipient (hi it’s me)? Streamline your standard practice? The list is endless but this is the opportunity to learn what you need to from this mistake and it probably will help you in the future.
Give yourself some grace and forgive. I still feel guilt and shame over my email situation but I have to remind myself that it was years ago and I genuinely apologized. That situation has kept me from acting impulsively in the office ever since. K is a great lawyer and awesome at her job so I can only hope that my snarky sh*tty comment from years ago doesn’t still have a negative effect on her life.
It doesn’t matter the mistake you make at work you can work these six steps to come back from it and turn it into a learning experience for you.
