Are you convinced that only perfect people get promoted, or that a mistake is the end of your climb up the corporate ladder? Think again. According to New York Times writer Alina Tugend, author of Better by Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong, mistakes are actually useful, and our quest to avoid them at all costs might be more damning than positive. She learned this when she made an error in one of her ShortCuts columns for the Times. She felt badly about it, but her editor was understanding, and a correction ran in the paper.
However, that wasn’t the end of the story. The idea that mistakes are always “bad” gnawed at Tugend, prompting a followup column and her book, where she writes, “[W]e don’t want to make the same mistakes over and over. But that is different from thinking that we not only can but must do everything perfectly, and if we don’t, we are failures.”
I’ve fallen into this mindset myself numerous times; with one particularly egregious mistake, I compounded it by not telling anyone about it (even though it was bound to be discovered), sure that it would immediately doom me to never work again. Instead, when I finally did reveal it, yes, I was reprimanded, but I also learned and negotiated new ways of working to combat the root causes and new working procedures. Ultimately, as much as I do regret that error, I’m also glad I was able to discover that one mistake, honestly approached and examined, can actually make me a better worker because I am determined not to do it again.
Tugend says she “learned to really internalize – not just give lip service to – the idea that none of us are perfect and we’re all going to make mistakes, especially if we move out of our comfort zone. We should be proud of ourselves for taking risks, rather than berating ourselves for mistakes.”
She also points out that those who fear mistakes to the point that they avoid situations where they might ever risk making them do themselves (and, presumably, their companies, by extension) a disservice. “Super-perfectionists – and I’m not talking about high achievers, but people who can’t bear to make a mistake – often don’t know how to prioritize and so fear negative feedback that they don’t learn from their goof-ups. Even constructive criticism is considered so damning that ultra-perfectionists will do anything to avoid it.”
Lilit Marcus, founder of the website Save the Assistants and now editor of Crushable, says that many of her mistakes wound up on Save the Assistants (thereby helping other people to learn from them). An email snafu taught her a lesson she’s put to good use. “When I was an assistant I was going back and forth with another admin at a different company about setting up a meeting for our bosses,” says Marcus. “When we finally nailed down a time, I sent a confirmation email to her and cc’d her boss, figuring it couldn’t hurt to make sure they both had a copy of the email. The assistant called me about five seconds later to chew me out, the gist of which was ‘It’s my job to manage his schedule, not yours.’ I understood why she was mad, and after that I made sure to include as few people as possible on emails in order to keep things streamlined.”
At 24, working her first job at an import/export company, Brenda Knight, now Associate Publisher at Cleis Press, wound up accepting a price for a huge order of candlesticks that was a nickel per item too low, which would have cost the company a significant amount of money. “I’d read Dale Carnegie’s book about the art of influencing people and he said if you’re really in trouble, to ask for help. I was talking to the person from India and said, ‘I really need your help, I really need you to add the price of a nickel back.’ He said he couldn’t do it and I just said ‘I need you to think about it.’” Yes, he found a way to make the change, and save Knight’s job. Her takeaway? “I learned that people’s essential nature is inherently good; they want to help. Instead of making excuses and lying, just ask for help, and people will always respond.”
Novelist and blogger Justine Musk of Tribal Writer recently wrote, “Mistakes force the brain to slow down, to evaluate things, to pay sharp attention and truly think its way forward (instead of shifting into automatic pilot). When you’re pushing the edges of your abilities, you lay down new neural pathways that pave the way to greater learning and deeper accomplishment.” I’ve found that when I make a mistake, whether a small one or a larger one, it’s a sign that something in my life is amiss; I’m working too quickly so I don’t notice a typo, or I’m so overscheduled that I completely forget something. Of course nobody wants to make mistakes, but recognizing that we all do, and figuring out how they can be learning moments, is useful to workers and managers dealing with employees who’ve messed up.
Concludes Tugend, “Mistakes have gotten a bad rap. I believe everyone should work hard, hope to achieve high standards and be conscientious, but we’re all human and we all will make mistakes. If we rush to ignore them, we can’t learn from them. If we spend all our time trying to avoid them, we don’t take risks. The most successful people in the world are not those who never screw up, but those who know how to bounce back after mistakes and failure.”
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