You made a mistake at work. How do you recover the situation successfully?

Have you ever made a mistake at work? If you haven’t, know that I am inordinately jealous of you. If you have, join the club.

One of my earliest, and most embarrassing mistakes at work involved a client, his name, and autocorrect. While I apologised profusely (and received a gracious pardon from the client), I think his secretary held a grudge for a while. After that, I learned from my gaffe. But I still went on to occasionally make mistakes at work.

Because here’s the thing. No matter how careful you are, you are bound to slip up sometimes. If you are lucky, the mistake you made is only embarrassing and not potentially damaging to your career or the company. But if you made a mistake at work that has bigger consequences, what can you do?

If you were a character in a rom-com, you can run away to a tiny village in the countryside and start over. And possibly find the love of your life and give up your thus-far-successful life in the city. But since this is reality, that’s not an option. So let’s get to fixing the mess you made at work.

Accept that you made a mistake at work

You can go from mangling a client’s good name à la me, or missing an important appointment with a client to something even worse. But, no matter the impact of it, you made a mistake at work. The situation is going to be stressful, and as a result, your emotions will be all over the place. Frustration, embarrassment, shame and even a bit of fear that you’ll get sacked are natural.

Take a deep breath, allow yourself to take in the emotions it brings up and then let that breath go. If you need more than one breath, hey, that’s completely fine. Concentrating on your breathing will give you time to process what happened and get your emotions settled enough so that you can deal with the aftermath.

However, sometimes it takes more than deep breaths to accept that you made a mistake at work. In which case, something more strenuous might help. Bottling up all the negativity that this incident brought to life is not good. So give yourself an outlet via a brisk run after work, or similar.

Deal with the mess as soon as possible

Once you take some time to accept the reality of your situation and calm down, it is time to go into recovery mode. Try to be proactive so that your mistake does not spiral into an even bigger mess. Addressing the consequences as soon as possible shows that you are aware of the situation. And that you are actively trying to resolve it. Which will earn you some brownie points from your team. It’ll also spare them from the awkwardness of having to bring it to your attention.

If you are in a leadership position, take the time to address your subordinates. Acknowledge your mistake, apologise if their work is getting impacted, and then share your plan of action to fix the situation.

Be prepared for the consequences

Years ago, I covered a launch party when I was a rookie freelance writer with a photographer. It’s important to note that this is not my usual go-to photographer. Unfortunately, she didn’t check the camera’s battery before the event. Predictably, it died before the launch was halfway through, and we did not get a lot of usable images. I did end up getting a big lecture from the client who never came to me again after that mess.

An argument can be made that the photographer made this particular mistake at work. After all, her camera, her duty to check her equipment, right? But since the client hired me, I didn’t think pointing this out in the middle of admitting the mistake would help matters. But, I did ask the photographer to attend the event with me. So I had to accept the consequences of my decision.

Accepting the consequences when you make mistakes at work is not always palatable. Sometimes it can end with an apology. Sometimes you might have to work overtime. Maybe you will even have to face more severe consequences. Whatever it is, don’t argue or protest if you are genuinely in the wrong. Complaining one you have to deal with the fallout shows that you don’t take your mistakes seriously. That you aren’t even going to take any responsibility for it. Which is not the image you want to portray. And whatever ‘punishment’ you have to suffer is a small price to pay if it means you get to keep your job.

Get use to attention after you made a mistake at work

Life is going to be awkward for a little while after you make a mistake at work. Depending on the severity of the mistake, people (especially your boss) are going to pay attention to you. It’s time to show everyone that you are a model employee. In order to move past the mistake, make sure you are super diligent going forward. Get to work early. Stay late. Keep your head down and be more productive than you’ve ever been.

Even then, there will be a lot of people side-eyeing you. And even more, people are going to talk about it, in your presence or outside of it. Prepare to be fodder for the rumours mill, and be the butt of jokes. Try to be as gracious as you can. But if people begin to get malicious, address it directly or through HR.

Don’t blow things out of proportion

Having a sense of perspective after you made a mistake at work is difficult. There will be a lot of heightened emotions which will make everything seem worse than they actually are. Unless you are in a field where another person’s life is literally in your hands, you do have the chance to fix your mistakes. So try to keep a handle on your sense of perspective before panic sets in.

Yes, you might have sent an embarrassing email to your boss. Or maybe you got some facts and figures wrong in the report you submitted to shareholders. Maybe your fear of public speaking affected an important deal your company was trying to pull off. These all have impacts on your career. And in some cases, your company too. But at the end of the day, they can also be fixed. No one is dying. The world is not coming to an end, as much as I hate that saying that phrase.

Just regain your composure, resolve the situation and then move on.

You are not the only one to have made a mistake at work

When you are living through a professional mistake, it’s very easy to feel that everyone else is perfect. But no one is. Once I was going through some internal drama after I accidentally deleted an important recording at work. Another one of my colleagues was freaking out because her email to a client was ‘too informal’. Another day at the office.

So it doesn’t matter if your email to your manager was full of typos. Or if you got a little carried away with the refreshments at the office party. Even if you are the only one trying to fix a mistake right now, most of your colleagues will also have memories of mistakes they’ve made in the past.

Yes, we should all be diligent and do the best job possible. But if you make a mistake at work, let yourself be human. As long as it’s not serious enough for heads to roll and people to lose their jobs, your colleagues will be understanding.

Learn from your mistakes

The autocorrect fiasco made me double-check what I write, and then review it online using Grammarly. The dead camera battery taught me to always check in with the camera person to check that the equipment is all good to go. As for the deleted audio file? While I never managed to recover it, I did start to upload it to the cloud as soon as possible. And keep a separate backup file on my computer, just in case the cloud failed me.

See? Mistakes can be learning opportunities. You don’t have to view them as all doom and gloom. Analyse where you went wrong, what and how it went wrong and how you fixed it. Then make sure to never make the same mistake twice.

After all, in the words of a kindred spirit: