Celebrate your mistakes? It’s a little unorthodox, but celebrating your mistakes may just help you make fewer of them.
According to self proclaimed “Chief Happiness Officer,” Alexander Kjerulf, celebrating your mistakes means making fewer mistakes on the job, learning opportunities, and a chance to strengthen creativity.
Here are just three of the five reasons to celebrate mistakes at work:
1. When you celebrate mistakes, you learn more from the mistakes you make.
“When we can openly admit to screwing up without fear of reprisals, we’re more likely to fess up and learn from our mistakes,” Kjerulf said. Take advantage of on the job mistakes and let your employees come to you – building a “trust-core” relationship with the people that are commonly the face of your company is important for success.
2. When mistakes are celebrated, you strengthen creativity and innovation.
Kjerulf says that the sooner you screw up, the sooner you can learn from it. To promote creativity and innovation in your workplace try this exercise – when an employee makes a mistake ask them to come up with several ideas on how to keep it from happening again, both for their own benefit and for their fellow coworkers.
3. When you celebrate mistakes, you make fewer mistakes.
Three things Kjerulf says about employee behavior are…
- Employees do not work better under pressure
- People commonly resist reporting bad news
- People close their eyes to signs of trouble
All of these things, Kjerulf says, are especially true if the company is known to punish people that make mistakes. When mistakes are made in the workplace, make sure to not establish that cause and effect relationship with your employees to avoid a tension-filled workplace.
What do you do when your employee makes a mistake on the job?
2 Comments
I’m not quite answering this the right way, since I’m an employee. When I make a mistake at work, I own up at once, whatever the result. I even say right out when it -might- have been my error (team effort, not always possible to say even by those involved). Why? Because first, it’s easier to work to solve it from the soonest rather than cause more difficulty over time and/or hope no-one notices. Second, I will not have someone else blamed for my mistake. Third, it gives me a well-earned reputation for honesty, and if something happens and I can say honestly “That was not me” it will be believed straight off.
In the last while, due to understaffing and stress on everyone, mistakes are lectured more harshly and/or more passive-aggressively. That frustrates me, and it does become harder to care so much or to want to own up. But for the moment, that’s my creed and despite everything, I don’t see it changing.
Anne,
Thanks for sharing your story. I think in a smaller organization, those things tend to happen whether we like it or not. But I think it’s my job here to encourage behavior that will change the industry. It’s admirable that you own up to your mistakes. I hope this article helped you in some way.
Thanks,
Mike