Stop Hiding Your Mistakes

If you’re a bowler, you’ve probably had several frames where you bowled strikes, but it is a rarity to get a strike in every single frame and bowl a perfect 300 game. The same goes for your work life — it is a rare thing to produce multiple projects in a row without making a few mistakes.

You can try to hide mistakes, but it’s unlikely you can get away with it for very long

You can only plan for so many mistakes. If you try to hide mistakes from your clients or your managers, it’s worse in the long run and reflects poorly on your work ethic. It’s better to be upfront and transparent about any mistakes you’ve made. So many people dwell on the fact they made a mistake and worry about the mistake being discovered that they overlook the obvious — don’t wait for it to be discovered — take ownership of mistakes as soon as they happen.

If you spend all your time worrying about who is going to find your mistakes, you’ll never have time to find the solutions to those mistakes.

The best way to present the fact you made mistakes is to know where and when the issue occurred, what was impacted, and a solution or two about what everyone can do right now to help reduce as much of the negative results as possible. Owning up to mistakes with alternative plans for resolving any issues those mistakes create is a sign of a professional.

It’s not a matter of IF things will go wrong in your life, it’s simply a matter of WHEN.

Be the person who is the first to identify the problem and own it. Your boss, your team, and your clients will respect your leadership, and you just never know when the solution you propose just might bring about better results that the original project produced without mistakes!