Anyone who tells you they have never made a mistake at work is lying. Do not hire that person. Or work for them. At some point they will inevitably tip you into a bucket of sewage and leave you there to ferment.
A few years ago I was doing consulting work for large corporates and government departments. Exciting times. At the end of one particularly large project, as I was tidying up the file and doing all that fun end-of-project paperwork, I was checking something in a spreadsheet and noticed that one of the formulas was wrong. Only a small thing, until I followed it through to the end and realised it had been getting exponentially bigger. So big, in fact, that it completely changed the outcome of the analysis. By several hundred thousand dollars. We had made the wrong recommendation to the client. And guess who had written the original formula, and then carried it through the whole analysis?
I can still remember that feeling, I didn’t know whether to throw up, hide under the desk or just run in circles shouting obscenities. From memory I think I went with all three. Then I ran to the boss’s office and explained (while breathing into a paper bag) what had happened.
Cue a panicked day of chasing Letters of Intent, frantically renegotiating with suppliers and stiltedly calm conversations with the client. Luckily we were able to fix it all and I survived long enough to get home and do sheep-noise sobbing into a glass of wine.
I still get gut-churny feelings when I remember that day, but in hindsight, a few things about it stand out as lessons in how to handle it when things go wrong.
1. Checksums
The reason I found the mistake was that we had a series of checks we had to go through before the sign-off stage of every project. I used to hate them, they were tedious and time consuming and oh, look, they just saved us a nasty lawsuit and the loss of a major client. Tedium, not so bad really.
To this day, I still use checksums in spreadsheets. Crime stats and budget calculations have the same arithmetic, checksums have saved me from any number of minor mistakes that become major fouls.
2. Fessing up
As soon as I found the error (and could move my legs again) I went straight to my boss to tell him exactly what I’d done and exactly how bad it was. That says quite a lot about him. It’s a natural instinct, when you’ve messed up, to want to hide it, to put it in a drawer and hope it turns into a packet of biscuits (I have tried this approach, sadly it never works and eventually you run out of drawers). If you trust the people you work for, know that they will understand that mistakes can happen, protect you as far as they can, and work with you to fix the problem, you’re much more likely to tell them when cock-ups occur. If you think they will react badly, cover their own arse at your expense, or use your mistake as a weapon against you, why would you ever be honest about it?
3. Timing
Small mistakes get bigger over time. If I’d waited even another day, we might not have been able to pull back letters before they were signed or negotiate rates that were almost finalised. There were also things happening I didn’t know about, related to the project we were doing, which would have had a domino effect if we hadn’t fixed my mistake when we did. Another week and we would have lost more than one client, another month and more than just one person would have lost their job. One panicky day was nothing in comparison.
4. It’s the cover-up that kills you
My boss was as up-front with the client as I was with him. We waited long enough to be able to go with a solution, not just a problem, but we told the client pretty much exactly what had happened within an hour or so of finding it, and we apologised. So the client knew we were honest with them and that we had the ability to fix it. They weren’t thrilled about the whole thing, but they did stay with us and it didn’t do any real damage to the relationship we had with them. Had we lied about it or tried to hide it, maybe we would have gotten away with it, but probably not, and there’s that nasty lawsuit and immediate farewell to a major client again.
After it was all over, the client said to me “everyone makes mistakes, at least we know now that you’ll tell us about yours”. In an odd way, it meant they trusted us more, not less.
5. The buck stops somewhere
In the case of that particular screw up, I had someone to run to. It was a small business, so the person I ran to was the owner, he didn’t have anyone to handball it to, and luckily for all of us, he handled it well. But I’ve also been the owner of a business and that’s its own bag of scalded cats when something goes wrong. There’s nowhere to run, no one to take over and usually very little time to make decisions. If panic pushes you in the wrong direction, it’s a huge slog to get back on track. Particularly when you’re operating under public scrutiny. One wrong call under the commendatory glare of the internet can attract global opprobrium, as I learned during one unforgettable night of replying to furious emails from as far afield as Canada and Johannesburg.
Getting older has a number of downsides (oh sleep, I never valued you enough) but hopefully with time you learn a few things. Possibly one of the most useful things I’ve learned is to be more tolerant of my own mistakes, and by extension, other people’s. If you can be less afraid of mistakes, they don’t have to become catastrophes. And if the people who work with you are not afraid of you, their mistakes are something they bring to you for help, not something they hide from you and thereby make them worse.
And when all else fails, at the end of the day there’s always a glass of wine and a friend to share the horror.