This is an audio transcript of the Working It podcast episode: ‘You messed up at work. What now?’
Mischa Frankl-Duval
Hi. Before we begin, we’d love to hear a bit more about you and what you like about this show. We’re running a short survey, and anyone who takes part before August 29th will be entered into a prize draw for a pair of Bose QuietComfort 35 wireless headphones. You can find a link to the survey and terms and conditions for the prize draw in our show notes.
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Hugh Carnegy
The ones that I don’t worry about so much are the ones that come forward, put their hand up and are racked with upset about it because I know that those people are going to work really hard to try and avoid ever making a mistake again.
Isabel Berwick
Hello and welcome to Working It from the Financial Times. I’m Isabel Berwick. As mistakes go, the recent CrowdStrike IT outage was pretty bad. Millions of computers were hit, grounding planes, disrupting hospital appointments and knocking broadcasters off air. Most of us will never make a mistake that severe, but we will screw up at work one way or another.
How can we regain the trust of our colleagues when we mess up? How can we lessen the likelihood of making mistakes? And what can managers do to make sure their teams aren’t afraid to own up when they get something wrong? A little later, I’m going to speak to Sandra Sucher to find out. Sandra is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and a leading researcher on trust. She’s going to tell me how trust is lost and what we can do to win it back.
Before we hear from Sandra, I’m going to speak to Hugh Carnegy. Hugh is a senior editor here at the FT, but he has a very particular brief. Here he is to tell us more about it.
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Hugh, welcome to Working It.
Hugh Carnegy
Thank you for having me.
Isabel Berwick
Tell us what you do here at the FT, cause I’ve invited you for a very specific reason.
Hugh Carnegy
Well, my main role at the FT these days is in charge of corrections and complaints, which means that whenever we’ve made a mistake, I have to deal with that mistake and decide whether we need to publish a correction and make sure that it goes through the process and speak to the people that have been responsible for the mistake.
And I also deal with complaints. That is where it’s not just simply a question of an error over a number or a name or something straightforward and factual like that, but where there’s a more serious complaint about our journalism and I help the others to deal with those responses.
Isabel Berwick
So fundamentally, it’s a process of trust, actually.
Hugh Carnegy
Yes, it is. And it’s absolutely fundamental to the FT. Because what we write and what we publish, if it’s not trustworthy in the eyes of our readers, then they won’t be our readers for very long. So it is an absolutely fundamental thing for us to not only work very hard to get it right, but also to put the record straight when we don’t, put our hand up.
Isabel Berwick
What’s behind the mistakes you see? Is it miscommunication? Oversight? Overconfidence?
Hugh Carnegy
There’s a variety of things. A lot of it, unfortunately, is just a little bit of carelessness. It’s just people not checking, not being diligent enough about the information that they’ve gotten and that they publish. We mix up millions and billions and trillions, those sorts of things. And very often it’s impossible to identify exactly why somebody has made a mistake. But it can come down to being in a hurry or just not checking.
And so when we look back into it, usually the response to people is, well, just try to turn up the radar. And before you file a story to your editor, double check. Double check your numbers before you press the button and send the story through to the editor.
Isabel Berwick
That’s extremely good advice for anybody, I think. So what would be your advice for listeners? If you find out you’ve screwed up at work, what’s the first thing you should do?
Hugh Carnegy
A hundred per cent the most important thing to do is just to put your hand up and say, look, I’ve made a mistake and it needs to be corrected. If it’s something that’s very clear-cut and it’s just a factual error, you know, we’re very clear with people. If you’ve made a mistake, the most important thing to do is to put the record straight as quickly as possible.
The worst thing is the prevaricated person that sort of tries to dodge responsibility or brush it under the carpet or pretend it didn’t happen, because that tends to just make it worse. And I’m never upset with people who’ve made mistakes. We all make mistakes. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve made some howlers in my career. I mean, you would over many decades.
So my concern is that when people have made a mistake is that they feel that they should own up and that they won’t be unduly punished for it. So there’s a kind of culture of encouraging people to be honest about their mistakes, because that’s very important.
Isabel Berwick
I’m sure you have a very fine nose for people who are trying to deflect or hide. How would you advise our listeners to manage people in perhaps their own teams who are not taking responsibility for things they’ve done wrong?
Hugh Carnegy
I think you have to be clear with them. If you suspect that somebody or you find out that somebody has made an error and then tried to cover it up and probably got your organisation in a little bit more trouble as a result, there’s no alternative to speaking to them. I don’t think naming and shaming in public is a good idea. I think it’s much more effective to do it quietly and privately. What we don’t want to do is have a culture where people are afraid to own up and therefore be inclined not to own up, and then that makes it worse.
Isabel Berwick
Yeah. It’s what we would call a culture of psychological safety. All right, so let’s lighten it a bit. Are there any mistakes that you’ve seen first-hand or heard about that made you laugh?
Hugh Carnegy
Absolutely, there are. And that’s one of the funny things about in the kind of newspaper and publishing businesses is some of these mistakes, let’s be honest, are hilariously funny. And I can give you a couple of examples, both from us and from our rivals.
I mean, there’s a beautiful one that could only have come from the Guardian: “A reader noted that our recipe called spaghetti with radicchio, fennel and rosemary did not include spaghetti, fennel or rosemary. The ingredients and method were right, but it should have been titled: strozzapreti with radicchio and balsamic.”
And of course, we’re not immune here at the FT. An absolute classic a few years ago, where we reported that the former prime minister of India, Morarji Desai, had a propensity for drinking cow’s urine as a kind of daily health thing. He did not. What he did do, though, was drink his own urine daily. (Isabel laughs) We felt compelled to publish a little correction on that front.
Isabel Berwick
I love it. I mean, yes.
Hugh Carnegy
But . . .
Isabel Berwick
But yeah, we need to be sick.
Hugh Carnegy
Yeah, here’s a but, because, and you mentioned that I do classes on this and that’s how I sort of kick things off. So I get everybody laughing and then say, but actually look folks, this is very serious. It’s very serious because as I’ve said before, totally underpins everything we do at the FT that our readers trust what we publish, and correcting our mistakes is a hugely important part of that.
Isabel Berwick
What would you counsel to people who become incredibly overanxious and distressed by making a mistake? How can we get over it?
Hugh Carnegy
Strangely enough, I think it’s reassurance. That’s the thing. Of course, if somebody has made a bad error, it’s a bad error and you have to take the consequences. But equally, I think it’s just incredibly telling as to how people react to making a mistake. And the ones that I don’t worry about so much are the ones that come forward, put their hand up and are wracked with upset about it, because I know that those people are going to work really hard to try and avoid ever making a mistake again.
So if somebody is in some distress about it, I tend to be very reassuring and say, look, you know, it’s not getting away from the fact that we’ve made a mistake here and we’ll sort it. But don’t beat yourself up too much. Put the energy into thinking what went wrong and working out how to try and avoid doing so again. It’s those that are more insouciant about making mistakes that I think are the ones you need to worry about.
Isabel Berwick
And how often do you find that people make mistakes because they’re preoccupied, perhaps by something in their private life? And how should managers deal with that?
Hugh Carnegy
I think if you’re . . . say a team leader and you’re working closely with somebody a lot, and you can perceive that there’s something going on in the background which may have contributed to it, then I think those are circumstances where it’s appropriate to, you know, sensitively step in. In my role, as it happens, where I’m kind of dealing with corrections across the organisation. I may have no idea about somebody’s work or their relationship with their, with their colleagues in that team, and not at all what may be going on in their private life.
But I think you have to be aware that those are all potential factors. If I feel that there might be something there, I might suggest to their team leader that this person seemed particularly stressed or was complaining about workload or something like that and pass that back. But, that’s something where you have to judge it quite carefully.
Isabel Berwick
And when we’re talking about dealing with external stakeholders and trust, you know, what would be your advice to people listening? Now, how do you maintain trust with external organisations who are, you know, angry or mistrustful at something that’s happened in the relationship? So as our readers or people that we’ve quoted might be angry at us.
Hugh Carnegy
I think you just have to be honest. I think that’s the most important thing is just be straight. If you’re straight with people, they tend to be quite forgiving, actually. I mean, I’ve had lots of examples where we’ve had angry emails from people saying, how could you be so stupid? This is the most straightforward error you could imagine. And if you go back to them and say, you know what? You’re dead right. We got this terribly wrong. It was a bad mistake. We’re correcting it now. Thanks for pointing it out, and we’ll try hard not to make it again. You quite often get a follow up email saying, oh, I never expected to get a response and I appreciate it. And that is worth I think that’s worth a lot, actually.
I think that’s as valuable in terms of cementing trust amongst our readers as just producing a beautiful article, you know, that gets clicked hundreds of thousands of times because it tells you something about the nature of the organisation and the commitment.
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Isabel Berwick
Thank you, Hugh.
Hugh Carnegy
It’s a pleasure.
Isabel Berwick
Acknowledging your mistakes is a good starting point when you mess up, but it’s not the whole story. In fact, it’s only the first step to regaining the trust of the people you work with. What other steps do we need to take to put a blunder behind us? Well, I spoke to Sandra Sucher to find out. Sandra is co-author of The Power of Trust, a book all about how trust is lost and regained in a corporate setting. I started by asking her to tell me a little bit about her career.
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Sandra Sucher
So, I’m currently a professor at Harvard Business School. I’ve been there for more than two decades. I had a two decade — So don’t do the math here — career in industry before I spent 12 years at Fidelity Investments, where I was their chief quality officer. Kind of looking at mistakes that you make and how to recover from them. I was in fashion retailing for a decade before that.
At that point in my career, I thought I wanted to do something different. I’d always wanted to join Harvard Business School. I have an MBA from Harvard Business School. And so at the time that I was interested, they were interested in bringing practitioners, people who come from industry on to the faculty. And so I’ve been there quite happily ever since.
Isabel Berwick
So your experience of business mistakes isn’t just theoretical, then.
Sandra Sucher
Yeah. I come by this research very honestly. So. [Laughter] You know, this is, this is not like a theoretical thing for me. You know, I’ve made mistakes. I’ve been part of organisations that have had to learn what to do when you do make them. And so it’s always been something that I was interested in. I was fortunate to find a great partner in the woman, Shalene Gupta, who’s my co-author on the book. And, we pulled together a lot of research I’d already done and then did some new research to write the book and all the stuff that I’ve been doing since.
Isabel Berwick
Trust is a big topic. How should we start thinking about it do you think?
Sandra Sucher
So, I think the first thing to learn is that trust is a relationship. And it’s a relationship of vulnerability. When you trust another party, organisation, you are willing to be vulnerable to their actions and their intentions. When I’m trusting, particularly in an organisational context and most of the time in life, I’m trusting in the actions that the other person either does or doesn’t do.
Isabel Berwick
So if we’re talking about trust in a workplace, would we build that by doing what we say we’re going to do? Is it as simple as that?
Sandra Sucher
That’s definitely a part of it and, you know, people . . . the first thing you think about is, you know, that it’s just a question of dependability. What I found in the research, is that, trust is actually multidimensional. People trust when they do and I’ve studied lots of organisations and individuals doing this. They’re trusting for four different reasons. The first is just you trust on the basis of competence. But trust is also in the moral domain, because when we trust another person, they have power over us, right? We’re relying on them to do stuff. And so that’s where, two other factors become really important. The first is just what motives they have. Now we can’t get inside their heads. And for most corporations, that’s probably a good thing. What we do instead is we infer people’s motives from whose interest we see them taking into account when they make decisions. So we look for whose interest they’re taking into account, what purpose they serve.
And then the second moral domain is a question of kind of fair means. Can I count on you to treat me fairly? And there are different kinds of fairness that you share information with me. Do you have a process that you apply to me the same way you apply to somebody else? In the fourth dimension is impact. So separate from all of whether you’re competent, whether you have great motives, you know, whether you’re treating people fairly. I’m judging you just based on the impact that your actions have on me. And so that means if you worry about whether or not you’ve done something wrong, you have to start to look at what you’ve done from the standpoint of what the other party sees you doing. For most of us, myself included, that’s ruinously hard. Particularly if you feel like you’ve messed up, and [inaudible] for you to deserve, stop focusing on your own embarrassment and shame and start to go well. But what about the other person?
Isabel Berwick
So if you make a mistake at work in terms of trying to restore that trust, do you sort of need to unpick what aspect of trust it is that you’ve broken?
Sandra Sucher
Yeah, and it’s usually more than one. Right. So, the first thing that you have to think about is on what basis if I lost trust. You know, that’s what gets you into practical kind of problem-solving mode, is when you can take anything and divide it into parts and say, which one matters here? And so . . . and that requires a degree of kind of dispassionate, examination of your own actions, and a willingness to, to kind of sit in that space of the other person and try to understand how it is that they see what you’ve done.
Isabel Berwick
So that would require us to sort of sit with our shame essentially if we’ve made a mistake or messed up at work.
Sandra Sucher
That’s what makes that apology moment so hard. It’s like all of a sudden I have to shift from, oh my God, you know, what did I do wrong? And I feel so bad about that. To thinking about, well, I’ve really made some other people’s lives not so great.
Isabel Berwick
So the apology has to come. Are there any other sort of concrete steps that we should take, even for small mistakes, perhaps, as well as big ones?
Sandra Sucher
So good apology has three parts to it. There are six identified things that are good to do. Three really matter. The first is just an acknowledgement of responsibility and to say you’re sorry. So that’s the very first thing that people wanna hear, and they wanna hear you say you’re sorry and they wanna hear you take responsibility for what you’ve done. So that’s just, you know, that’s the beginning. The second element that’s really useful, important to add, is an explanation of how this happened. Because if you can explain to me how something happened, I have some confidence that you can fix it. But you can’t do that. And, you know, it’s like, oh, well, I don’t know. Is this actually going to get worked out? And the third is what’s called in trust research, an offer of repair. You know, think of the simple analogy. You sat in a restaurant in London. Your food was an hour late. Where’s my free drink? Do you know, is there a dessert that gets sent over? Meaning, is there some offer of repair that acknowledges the fact that I’ve been harmed?
Isabel Berwick
Is it possible to quantify the financial effects of trust? You know, have you found a link between companies with lower trust scores suffering in a measurable way?
Sandra Sucher
Yeah. You know, what you find is there’s actually, so on the one hand, the economists did a great study at one point. Just taking a look at what were the financial consequences. It had Wells Fargo at that time and some other companies that had serious trust breaches. And what they found was that there was a 30 per cent decline in market value. So there’s that. And then at this sort of more managerial level, you know, what you find is that, companies where people believe in the integrity of the leader, that they can be trusted, they can be two and a half times more revenue producing than a company where the belief is not in the workforce. And so, you know, they can increase profitability at a measurable level.
Isabel Berwick
That’s brilliant. And, I wanted to finish by saying, you know, we often hear that phrase, trust takes a long time to build, but only a second to lose. Is there any truth to that?
Sandra Sucher
I’d say on balance, it’s correct. It’s a little overstated. Sometimes the seeds of mistrust were laid pretty early. So, you know, sometimes it’s kind of like the end of a series of events of things that you either did or didn’t do. And so when you go to do the root-cause analysis, what happened here? It’s like, well, it fell down all at once. But what it was that led us there, you know, that had a long tail to it.
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Isabel Berwick
Mistakes don’t happen in a vacuum. They might happen because we’re under stress, either at work or at home, because of a more complicated systemic problem, or because we’re just being, well, careless. Doing the full post-mortem and working out why something went wrong can be torturous. But the best first step couldn’t be simpler — owning up really is the only place to start. Putting your hand up and admitting fault is really difficult, but you should always feel you can do it. If you don’t feel that way, your team probably has bigger problems.
This episode of Working It was produced by Mischa Frankl-Duval and mixed by Simon Panayi. The executive producer was Manuela Saragosa and Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. Thanks for listening.
