At work today I discovered a mistake that I can't believe I made. There's something I do every month that I forgot to do in November. As a result I've made our financial position look £126k worse than what it actually is. Majorly stupid mistake!
My excuse is that I came back to work from study leave in November with 5 days in which to catch up on 2 weeks worth of work, do all my month end prep work, and write off over 500 lines from one of our registers. Whilst all this was going on I finally completed on my flat and picked up my house keys. There was so much going on around that time that I just completely missed doing this one thing.
I did the sensible thing and admitted my mistake to my senior manager when I discovered it. Thankfully he didn't mind as much as I thought he might, but his words "Big mistake, you need to be more careful" are now playing over and over in my mind.
He's completely right though. It was a big mistake, and I do need to be more careful. So it's time to stop making excuses. Excuses don't fix things. I made a mistake, same as everyone else does, and it's time to learn from it and move on. So tomorrow I'm making the effort to get into work early, fix mistakes and prove to both my managers that this was a one-off and won't happen again.
If you find yourself in a similar position where you've discovered a mistake, here's my 4 step plan to dealing with mistakes:
1. Admit you did something wrong - you can't learn from a mistake if you don't acknowledge it happened.
2. Understand why it was a mistake - did you forget something, make a bad decision, neglect something, have too much to drink on a night out.
3. Figure out how to fix it - Say you're sorry, mend whatever is broken, explain why you did something, do anything you need to do to fix what you did.
4. Learn from it - What do you need to change to stop the same happening in the future.
A mistake is only a mistake if you don't learn from it.
Sarah x
No comments
Post a Comment