At this point, perhaps, it makes you feel better to know that everybody makes mistakes. Well, I have made tons.
How big was your mistake? Have you made this same mistake before? Did you own up to your mistake?
Again, I stress that it is very important to be honest to your boss or superior about the whole situation. Sometimes, it is difficult to be honest especially when there's something at stake. For one, your job is hanging on the line. And second, nobody likes being held accountable or responsible for a major screw-up. In most cases, whether we are at fault or not, we'll just start pointing fingers and blaming others.
Here's a real-life experience of how I caused my company to almost lose a very loyal customer . This lesson taught me to see the positive side of NOT pointing fingers at anyone else.
A customer e-mailed me one day, asking me about the status of his latest shipment. I was very surprised to receive his inquiry because in my records, he had no pending shipment. I responded to his email, summarizing all the orders we have shipped earlier that year and asked if we might have missed a new order from him.
My customer immediately replied, and he was furious! Our partnership was on the verge to being terminated because my customer could not accept how I had completely forgotten about his new order. After checking my records again, I was flabbergasted to find that there was indeed an order from my customer which I have forgotten to pass on to my factory. That order was left forgotten in my mailbox for more than 2 months since he placed the PO! If I had alerted my factory of his new order, his goods would have been completed in another 15 days from the time I received his email reminder. I had a serious problem. Production lead time is 75 days from the date of confirmed order. But, I only had 25 days to ship out the goods to my customer.
I alerted my boss of this situation and that I have forgotten to plan the customer's order, hence all this trouble. I asked if his US team could release some capacity to match my customer's order to meet the shipment date. My boss was of course not so happy about my mistake. At the end, the US team had to delay one of their shipments so mine could go out in 15 days. All this to save the partnership between my company and our angry customer.
My boss was gracious but stern that I must not repeat this mistake again. To sum it all, if I was not honest about my mistake and blamed everything else, most probably, we would have lost this customer. In crucial moments like this, we have to think fast on how to solve the problem at hand, and not make it anymore worse than it already is.
It may not make sense now, but we learn a lot more from making mistakes. We learn what NOT to do in the future and gradually, we become better problem solvers.
Always own up to your mistakes, correct them and learn from them. It's pointless if we don't learn anything from it because we'll just keep on making that same mistake again and again. So, take it as a life's lesson and remember it.
Here's a thought: Even bosses make mistakes too. We're after all just human.
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