Screwing Up

𝐇𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐰𝐞𝐝 𝐮𝐩 𝐢𝐧 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫? 💥

I have - and it can be a challenging situation to detect, navigate, repair, and learn from.

That's the topic of today's #HackingAcademia video: screwing up in your professional career.

I make a few key points:

👉 I'm talking about screw ups in the "middle" - between being late for a meeting and career ending screw ups. Ones that can do substantial damage to professional relationships or reputations (often repairable).

👉 no matter how hard you try to avoid it, if you are pushing hard you are almost inevitably going to screw up. The ideal is for this to be on rare occasions - if you're screwing up badly "on the regular" then that's probably a sign you're pushing too hard, or too far out of your depth

👉 screwups come in infinite forms and varities. Sometimes it's something as straightforward as saying something that offends someone - but it can also be a blind splot, omission or failure to do something that builds up over months or even years - complicating detection, and remediation.

👉 by definition, when you do screw up, it often won't be apparent. Sometimes the victim will tell you. Sometimes a trusted colleague will pull you aside and tell you. Avoid the automatic temptation to be defensive - your colleague will almost always have a point. Sometimes no-one will tell you, and you'll slowly realize much much later.

👉 certain situations make you more prone to screw ups. Tiredness, dealing with other people's screw ups all increase your vulnerability to screwing up yourself!

👉 genuine apologies do not weaken your position - or if they do, you're in such a toxic environment you're probably screwed anyway. Do it anyway - it's the right thing to do - and if, for some reason, you find out later that you weren't as much at fault as you first thought - that's a great outcome!

👉 learn from your screw ups but know they'll always be there. It's a fantastic growth opportunity - but as your career advances and changes, there will be new "innovative" ways to screw up, so you'll probably never eliminate them completely!

👉 when you screw up, the professional relationships and reputation you have built will support you. Most reasonable people will know that you've made an out-of-character mistake, and that you've (hopefully) made substantial and genuine attempts to repair and remedy the situation

👉 you can't always fix things, especially immediately. The temptation is to try and fix things immediately - but sometimes it takes time (and very rarely, you just can't fix it). A good achievable aim is to take the actions that mean that it's likely that everyone, when looking back in a year or two, think - "it was a screwup, it did some damage, they tried their best to fix it, and everything is OK now"

YouTube: https://youtu.be/6mTD_MTzFFc

#careers #mistakes

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Screwing up is unfortunately an almost inevitable part of most professional careers, especially if you're pushing yourself. And I wanted to talk about a few key concepts and experiences and tips and tricks for how to think about and deal with those occasional screw-ups that will pop up during your career. Now, just to define things a little bit, when I'm talking about screw-ups, I'm talking about not being late to a meeting once. And I'm also not talking about like life-changing screw-ups. I'm talking about those screw-ups in the middle zone where something you did or didn't do or something you said has caused substantial damage, reputational damage, it's offended someone, or a variety of other ways. There's an infinite variety of ways you can screw up. These are situations that are not great, but are often redeemable or at least partially redeemable. And I want to run you through a few of the key concepts. Now, the first one is some people are probably watching this video and saying, I don't think I've really, really screwed up at all in my career so far. Now that is possible, but I would assert that if you are pushing yourself reasonably hard in your career, you are on occasion going to screw up, no matter how much you guard for it or are vigilant. It is gonna happen. Now, if you are screwing up on a weekly basis and finding yourselves always in trouble and having to apologize constantly, that may be a good signal that you are actually pushing too hard. But even if you're not doing that, the occasional screw up will likely pop up in your career. Screw ups can come in a wide range of forms. A typical screw up is someone saying or communicating something that causes offense. That is often a screw up that has an immediate effect, but it doesn't always have to be that way. Sometimes a screw up can be a blind spot or an omission that occurs over many weeks or months or even years that accumulates over time and only comes to a head when you realize that you've missed something over a sustained period of time. So the screw ups are not always a concrete uh once-off event that happens at a specific moment in time. Screw ups come in all forms, they can be something that happened over a long period of time as well. And these can sometimes complicate how easy it is to detect or realize that you've screwed up in the first place. Now, one of the interesting things about screwing up is you will avoid a lot of screw-ups by being vigilant and self-aware and sort of checking yourself about what you should say or what you should do or not do across a variety of situations. Almost by definition, when you do screw up, it will not always be obvious to yourself that you have screwed up because if it had been, you probably would have caught it. So there are three typical ways you will find out that you have screwed up. First of all, the people or group or organization that you've screwed up with may tell you directly, perhaps even on the spot, if it's one of those screw ups that has happened in the moment. Um, but that doesn't always happen. The second way you'll find out that you've screwed up is a trusted colleague or friend will separately pull you aside and have a little word to you and say, look, I think you really botched this up and this is why, although explain the situation. That is a situation where it can be very natural to immediately get defensive. Uh, but if it's a trusted colleague, if they've pulled you aside in private, that is the time to listen because if they're experienced, they are almost always right that you have screwed up. It's just that you can't see it in the moment. And sometimes you will have screwed up, but you won't be told explicitly, and you may not realize, and no one may pull you aside, and it's only uh weeks or months later that you will realize in retrospect that you've screwed up. So there's a bunch of different ways in which you can get that feedback. One of the things that people are often concerned about is if they have genuinely uh screwed up, uh apologizing. And I know some of the tensions or concerns that come up is that people feel like if they apologize, they may be in a weaker situation. And what I wanted to say is if you're in a situation or an environment where apologizing sincerely is going to genuinely put you in a weaker situation that's exploited, you are probably screwed anyway. And you should still go ahead and do it because it's the right thing to do. But what I suspect you'll find is that in a lot of situations, if it's a synthere, authentic apology associated with some uh deliberate work on yourself to do better the next time, then it will genuinely be well received, perhaps not always well received right at that moment, uh, but genuinely, uh generally uh well received in the longer term. Obviously, one of the things you're trying to do is learn from your mistakes and screw ups, and and these are valuable uh learning curve type life lessons. Um, but the problem is if you are progressing in your career or changing in your career, there are always going to be new situations that you haven't experienced so far that can pop up that will cause you uh to screw up again in new and creative ways. So unfortunately, it's something that you probably can't get away from completely unless uh you are really sticking to your safe lane and not pushing yourself at all. When you screw up, one of the things that will really help you and save you and support you is whether you have built up long-term trusting professional relationships and networks, even with the person or organization that you've screwed up with. What is really reassuring in a lot of these situations is people will call you out or point out that you've really screwed up, but they will also know from having worked with you uh closely uh over many years that this screw up is not emblematic of what you are like all of the time. They will realize, at least in the passage of time, that you've genuinely made a mistake and that it is perhaps out of character, at least somewhat unexpected. And so, even though there can be a lot of tension or even anger at the time, um, people who you've built up relationships with will realize that this is just a misstep. Uh, it's not the end of the world. Of course, depending a little bit on the severity and the impact of the thing that you have screwed up. In the heat of the moment, when you've screwed up and there's repercussions or it's all falling apart, it can be very, very stressful. Again, having good support networks around you can really help. And one of the things I would suggest in these sort of situations is you're not going to be able to fix everything. People like to fix and resolve things instantly. You should try and do that where you can, but sometimes things are just not going to be great for a little period of time. One sort of uh achievable goal out of screw ups is to work hard on resolving the situation and repairing any damage that you might have done and aim for the goal of in a year's time when people look back at what happened and how you reacted to it, um, people go, Well, that person really, really screwed up, but they made a genuine effort to redeem and repair uh the situation. And even though it was uh quite damaging or it was annoying at the time, um, with the passage of time, I can I can forgive them or I can see why that happened or how that happened, uh and they've made a really sincere effort to make it better, so everything is okay now. That is a reasonable goal to go for. Again, you may not be able to achieve this in every single situation where you've screwed up, but you should be able to achieve it in the vast majority of those, even though it can be really stressful and chaotic at the actual time of the screw up. I have screwed up substantially in my professional career, maybe around eight or nine or ten times roughly, uh, depending on what you count. So over a period of two and a bit decades, it's about once every two years. Um, obviously, I would like that number to be far less, but I don't think if you go back and forensically analyze all the situations, uh, too many of those could have been avoided without the benefit of hindsight. The sort of situations where screw-ups can typically occur are situations where someone is particularly tired or stressed. Maybe someone has just commuted 30 hours across the world and is trying to make sensitive decisions while jet lagged and sleep deprived over the last 48 hours. That is a recipe for disasters to happen in high pressure environments with milestones that have been missed or other situations going on, or somewhat ironically, where other people have screwed up and caused problems for you, which then make it more likely that you yourself are gonna then screw up because you're under the gun, you're under the pump, there's a lot of pressure on you, you're trying to fix other people's problems, and then you cause your own problems that add into the mix. There's an again an infinite variety of ways in which you can screw up, um, and it's always or almost always the conjunction of a bunch of different things happening together that make you uh more likely to make a mistake. Screw ups are a part of both professional and personal lives. If it's happening a lot, maybe you're pushing too hard, but if it's happening just on rare occasion, that is often just comes with the territory. Uh what you learn from it, how you deal with it is a big part of professional careers, and of course in your personal life, but that's not what I'm talking about here. Uh, and it's something that you can grow from, uh, get some wisdom from and some experience from and try and do better the next time. So I hope uh you're not watching this video having just screwed up. Uh, but if you have, uh know that it's a learning experience uh and that you will be all the better for it in the long term.