From the course: Personal Effectiveness Tips

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What to do when you’ve made a mistake

What to do when you’ve made a mistake

From the course: Personal Effectiveness Tips

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What to do when you’ve made a mistake

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- Sadly, we all make mistakes at work sometimes. It could be missing a deadline, sending an email to the wrong person, or forgetting to switch out that slide and only discovering it in the middle of the presentation. It is always painful, but there are ways to handle it graciously. Here's how to do it. First, if there is one cardinal rule in overcoming mistakes with the prose term crisis management, it's this, admit your mistake quickly. Sure, people might well be upset, but they will be so much more upset if you delayed and lollygagged on telling them about it. It's a common protective response to want to hide it, or hope it goes away, or assume you can figure out some sort of solution and then you can tell them, but this almost always goes badly. Instead, man up or woman up and admit your mistake rapidly, ideally, before others discover it, and apologize where necessary. This is also useful, because it enables you to control the terms of disclosure. If they hear about it from…

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