Recovering Quickly from Leadership Mistakes

By Rose O. Sherman, EdD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN

I recently had a young leader call me and ask my advice about a situation where she had clearly made a mistake. One of her staff told her something very personal and asked her to keep it confidential. Later during a discussion with a charge nurse on the unit, the leader betrayed the confidence. The nurse found out and became very angry. Ultimately, she made the decision to leave the unit and told this young leader that she could not work for someone that she did not trust. The young nurse leader felt terrible about what had happened and no apology seemed to make it better. She was still ruminating about it three months later.

Most leadership mistakes are not big failures, but smaller mistakes that we inevitably make as we learn and grow in our roles. Experience is a good teacher but it can be painful to learn the lessons. So ultimately as leaders, the question is not whether we will make mistakes but rather how quickly we can rebound from them, learn our lessons and move on. If we don’t recover, we can find ourselves taking relatively minor setbacks and turning them into a much bigger deal than they should be. That will leave you frustrated, questioning your own ability and wasting energy that could be spent doing other things.

Instead, see it as a growth opportunity (one of many you will have) and be willing to forgive yourself. As a leader, the most important thing you can do is to take full responsibility for your role in what has happened. If this young leader had taken the road of blaming the charge nurse for talking to the staff member, she would have lost the respect of staff. Accept fault right away, and don’t attempt to make futile excuses or drag other people down with you. Any attempts to save face will only make your ownership seem halfhearted, forced, and disingenuous. Yet at the same time, you must be at peace with the reality that not everyone will give you a second chance. Sometimes people will react as this staff nurse did, and decide that they can no longer trust you. They may decide to terminate their relationship with you. It can feel like an indictment of your self worth.

While this is very painful, all you have control of in a situation where you have made the mistake is your own behavior. Jazz great Miles Davis once said, “When you hit a wrong note, it’s the next note that makes it good or bad.” That is a quote worth remembering.