Dealing with Mistakes as a Leader

Mistakes are bound to happen when you are building something meaningful. In fact, if mistakes aren’t surfacing regularly in your team, it might be a sign that everyone is operating too cautiously, avoiding risks that could push the company forward. As a leader, you’ll also find yourself having made and making plenty of mistakes along the way, some because of inexperience, others because of lapses in judgment. What I’ve learned over the years is that nobody wants to make mistakes, and more often than not, the person who made it is already far more concerned and ashamed than anyone else could make them feel.

This realization has shaped how I deal with mistakes in my team. I start with trust, assuming good intent, and first focus on fixing the problem before diving into a blameless root cause analysis.

Why do mistakes usually happen?

Almost always, mistakes can be traced back to a lack of controls. If the outcome is something you absolutely cannot afford, as a leader you must build the right guardrails. Because if the controls aren’t in place, the person who committed it didn’t “make” the mistake but simply “owned” the lacking of controls that you as a leader failed to enforce.

We have all heard the “intern” joke numerous times. But truth be told, all these organisations failed to enforce the right controls that will help an inexperienced newbie from committing a fatal mistake. Will you let a person without driving experience drive your car on a speeding highway?

In software, bugs and regressions are inevitable, and dependencies break all the time. Not saying you should let them happen but no matter how many controls you enforce you can never be too safe and sure. And if you are an early team or building something from scratch, if you shipped a product with no bugs, you have probably shipped it too late and too safe.

Dealing with mistakes when they do happen

When mistakes do happen, the worst thing you can do is panic or berate the person responsible. In those moments, they are already battling stress and self-doubt, and harsh reactions only cloud their focus further from solving the situation.

Personally, it has helped me going back to my own moments when I made a similar mistake and understanding how I felt in that moment. I have been lucky to have come across some of the most understanding and forgiving supervisors early in my career who dealt with those mistakes with kindness and helped me realise that owning a mistake becomes easy when it comes from within rather than from a beating by others.

Of course, you may also encounter people who refuse to own up and quickly shift blame. That’s when the balance shifts. Trust is where you start, but not everyone deserves it unconditionally. If someone consistently avoids accountability, then it’s equally your responsibility to make them face it. Kindness should not turn into an excuse for negligence.

Avoiding the mistakes

It is a mistake if it happens once but repeating those mistakes make us a fool. So once the dust has settled, it’s critical to ensure the same mistake never repeats. That means running a blameless root cause analysis to identify missing checks, new processes, or stronger controls. Often, the person who made the mistake is the one most motivated to implement the fix as they never want to feel that shame again. If instead you see someone unwilling to take responsibility even in the corrective phase, that’s a red flag about their investment in the team’s success. On the other hand, those who own and fix their mistakes deserve recognition, because they turn a setback into a safeguard for everyone.

At the end of the day, mistakes are simply part of the journey to doing great work. What really defines you as a leader is how you guide your team through them with calmness in the middle of the storm and with rigor afterwards to prevent recurrence. Start with trust, fix the issue without drama, and then let the learning strengthen your team’s foundation.