How to Admit When You’re Wrong

It doesn’t matter how powerful or intelligent that you are, and how high you are up at the food chain of your office, you are bound to be wrong some time. The key to showing real leadership, though, is admitting when you are wrong. If you want your staff to learn from their mistakes, you need to set a good example. If you are defensive and unapologetic, they will be, too. Not to mention that some of them may not acknowledge their mistakes at all, and may even try to hide when they are wrong. This could hurt your bottom line.

How can you have a successful business or organization if nobody ever even acknowledges poor decisions, let alone apologizes or attempts to fix them? The answer is that you can’t. The road to a business closing is paved with mistakes that were never taken care of.

So why not show a different way to be? Here’s what you should do when you make a doozy of a mistake, or hurt someone’s feelings, or make a bad decision:

• Speak in the first person: Don’t say something passive like “mistakes were made.” Say “I made a mistake.”  Using the first person can go a long way when it comes to communicating sincerity and taking responsibility.
• Apologize — and mean it: Life coach experts say that a sincere apology can work wonders. Don’t do a non-apology apology where you give lip service to sounding like you are giving an apology. In addition, phrases like “I’m sorry that you feel that way” or “I apologize if I offended anyone” put the onus on the other person, instead of taking responsibility.
• Don’t make excuses, or try to pass responsibility:  Those who need the apology don’t need the excuses, and you giving them excuses will simply tick them off. If you are a manager who made a poor business decision, it is important to own up to it and to take responsibility, even if it really was due to bad advice by your staff. You will set a terrible example if you pass along the blame.
• Fix it:  It is not enough to merely apologize. You need to fix things, if you can, or try to make amends, or get rid of the bad policy that you made. It is not just that it is the right thing to do. It is that others on your staff will see how the way you handle mistakes with fortitude and the willingness to do the right thing, and they can follow your example.
• Learn from it:  If you learn from your mistakes or bad decisions, then all is not lost. You will have gained something when it comes to the next time you are faced with such a situation. That bad decision should be seared in your memory not to paralyze you the next time around, but that you learn from it. Talking to your staff about it can help them learn from it as well.