What Your Reaction to Mistakes Says About Your Leadership

A mistake is rarely the most revealing part of a workplace moment. What comes right after it usually is. There is a half-second of silence when someone admits they got it wrong, and in that pause, a leader shows what they do with discomfort. They move toward the person, or they move away.

Mistakes happen!

The way you handle them says a lot about your leadership.

In my latest article for the Forbes Coaches Council, I write about a division leader I call David, who believed he had handled a costly error well. He never raised his voice or assigned blame. But his flat questions and quiet "let me think about next steps" told his team something he never intended, and an anonymous survey months later made that clear. His turning point came when he went back and named his own discomfort, not the engineer's competence, as the problem.

The piece also explores a second, harder test. It is one thing to extend grace when someone else makes a mistake. It is another to hold yourself to the same honesty you ask of everyone else. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety at Harvard Business School suggests that the teams reporting the most errors are often the ones who feel safe enough to say so, which means silence is not proof of a clean team.

If you lead people, you are being watched in both moments. The question is what they see.

Read the full article on Forbes: What A Leader's Reaction To A Mistake Reveals

What did you do the last time you were the one who got it wrong?