I Made a Mistake at Work
by Rakshitha Arni Ravishankar, Associate Editor
In my first job, I worked at a news agency. One of my tasks was to write breaking news packages and send them to our other news media partners. At 7 am on a Wednesday, I published a report about an ongoing incident in the city. A couple of hours later, my boss walked into the office and asked me to take the story down.
I had made a bunch of errors: The date in the story was incorrect, and I had misspelled the name of a public figure. Since it was an ongoing report, all my reports that followed the first story also mirrored these errors. Not only did I have to issue a retraction, but I also had to rewrite everything and send a fresh package to each partner.
This was the second time in the same week that I’d made a typo and issued a retraction — it only made the experience more painful.
Later that day, my manager set up a check-in for us. I sat across the table from her, waiting. I wanted her to fire me, to just get it over with. Instead, she asked me how I was doing. When I responded with a half-hearted “okay,” she said, “I want to help you.” She'd noticed that I was skipping lunch and working late hours. She reassured me that we were working in a high-stress environment, and it was normal to feel the pressure.
In the next half hour, we spoke about feeling burned out, what I could do to slow down, and discussed my priorities. My manager went so far to tell me that I could reach out to her the next time I felt anxious while reporting on a difficult event.
Through this conversation, I learned some of the most valuable lessons about my career: Making mistakes is inevitable, especially when you’re in situations that are stressful. The goal is to use these moments to learn, improve, and grow.
I still make typos — and it feels terrible. But so does everyone else. I also now know that most things are salvageable.
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Planner, Organizer, Coordinator & Project manager | Civil engineer | Specialist in Surveying Issues and the estimation and calculation of project | Researcher in Sustainable Development in the Construction Industry
2 年I would also like to participate in writing inspirational content, many of which are based on my personal experiences. Please guide me. HBR Ascend
Head of Data and Analytics
2 年We can’t avoid mistakes but we can avoid making the same mistake twice by learning from the first one.
Growth Marketing Leader | Customer Obsessed | Coach + Team Builder| Tenacious Storyteller| Big Thinker & Do-er| SaaS Startup-SMB-Enterprise| Dragon Slayer| Optimist
2 年Right on! Mistakes happen but how we move forward is what's important?
Retired from Home Instead senior care of Bowling Green Kentucky
2 年Thank you for sharing
Nice article! From the safety perspective, how we set the culture around mistakes and how we set people to err on the safe side majes a huge difference on the potential outcomes of errors. Given that humans make mistakes, a couple of questions organizations might ask is 1) how we create a culture where is ok to pause the job and raise concerns and report incidents without risk of being punished? 2) how do we align systems and processes to help workers to err on the safe side? Thanks for sharing!