AT WORK
Whatever your job, you never can afford not to admit and learn from your mistakes

By Andrea Kay
Gannett News Service

True or false:

You're more valuable to your company if you never make a mistake.

False. You learn best from failure — and learning is part of getting work done. That doesn't mean your goal is to be a bumbler. But if you don't make mistakes and learn from them, you never get better.

So why aren't more people running up to their boss to declare, "Hey, I goofed"?

For one thing, who wants to be seen as a failure? To be the one they blame when the project falls flat, the client screams, the electricity goes out or someone dies? In some places, mistakes are used against you. You get publicly ridiculed or labeled a bearer of bad news or not being a team player.

One employee told me he didn't admit a royal screwup to his boss because "telling him would just give the client more to use against us" even if "they're already mad enough."

Besides, a lot of bosses don't want to hear about messes that aren't easily fixable.

No matter what business you're in, you can't afford not to admit and learn from your mistakes. Work is just too complex. With technology and the pressure to be more efficient and responsive to customers, everyone is learning as they go and ready-made solutions to problems are fewer, explains an article in the publication Government Executive.

But if the bad news isn't getting through, nothing gets better.

That's why smart companies sit down and hash out what went wrong after a project or event has taken place. They call these discussions "postmortems," "project wrap-ups" or "lessons-learned briefings."

Unfortunately, some of our most important workers — those in the medical profession — rarely sit down to discuss errors. According to a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medicine Association, doctors in training don't have a forum to share mistakes and lessons learned.

In 2000, the Institute of Medicine estimated that as many as 90,000 patients die in hospitals annually because of mistakes. Efforts made to prevent errors include putting bar codes on medications to ensure proper doses and computers by bedsides to make notes legible, according to a report on National Public Radio.

But experts who analyze medical errors say there's one change that would make the biggest difference: getting doctors to openly discuss errors.

In the NPR report, Dr. Lee Hilborne of the UCLA Center for Patient Safety and Quality said doctors usually focus on identifying who made the mistake, getting them to admit it and promising it won't happen again.

As one manager in a telecommunications company put it, "You can't let these meetings be a witch hunt or people become counter-productive."

Most adults learn best from informal, unstructured situations. Research at the Center for Workforce Development shows that employees relied on informal learning opportunities for about 70 percent of what they needed to know to do their jobs, says the Government Executive article.

Companies can do this by creating cultures that support learning. One manager at a Cincinnati company told me she sometimes uses anonymous feedback surveys when people are hesitant to speak up. Most of the time, though, she publicly rewards someone's insight.

"I lead a discussion on what happened and what would prevent this same problem from happening again," she said. "I pass along recommendations to others and act on it. The next time, people actually see the change made a difference."

And that's the real reward for everyone.

Career consultant Andrea Kay is the author of several books.