One of the questions I often ask in interview is around mistakes in the past that have made people who they are. The way in which people talk about them, the way in which they react and the learning they take from them is often fascinating. Of course, I’m not really interested in the mistake in itself, what I’m really interested in is firstly the sincerity with which they talk about the issue and the way in which they incorporate it into their leadership and management style.

How you handle mistakes can be fundamental to how you develop as a leader. There are two clear mistakes that I see people make;

1. Applying a kind of cognitive dissonance that seeks to apportion blame to others and absolve yourself of personal responsibility. Whilst this can be a useful tool in certain circumstances, there are very few situations that we can’t learn something from if we are willing to hold our own actions and decisions up for assessment.
2. Dwelling on a decision or issues to the point that it prevents us from being able to move onwards. People get stuck on a particular situation or moment and that makes them act differently or inhibits them without having really processed the learning.

It can be hard in the moment to get the right balance of reflection and self assessment without becoming stuck in the moment, so here’s how I think about it for myself.

1. Deal with the issue at hand first. When things go wrong the first thing is to try and rectify the issue and provide a way forward for whatever it is you’re facing into. There is zero benefit to be gained from over analysing whilst there is still an outstanding issue or problem to be solved.
2. Give yourself time to properly assess what happened. Our brains can make simplified versions of past events pretty quickly and sometimes that skips details or moments that we genuinely learn from. The shorthand is useful to get us through the immediate issue, but when we have time we need to unpack the full unadulterated version.
3. Be ok with identifying things you both could and couldn’t do differently. As with any action planning, you need to be able to own and take those steps, so be equally clear with the things that you wouldn’t be able to change in the future as those that you want to build into your leadership going forward.
4. Put it in a box. Once you’ve kicked it around and figured out the learning, put the experience into a box, put it at the back of the mental cupboard and close the door. Only hold on to the learning not the event or moment itself, it won’t serve you well.
5. But, hold onto the feeling. Remembering how you felt when you made a mistake is a great way of using your whole body to help you to achieve better outcomes in the future. When I ask people the question in interview, I can immediately see those that held onto the feeling.

One thing we can all be sure of is that mistakes happen, they will happen to all of us throughout our working lives. What we do with the experience, how we use it to drive us forward is the thing that makes the biggest difference. And sometimes that also means moving on.