This article is drawn from “The Business Meetings Sourcebook” (Chapter 13).

Everyone makes mistakes. As human beings we are not perfect and, despite our good intentions, we can sometimes `drop the ball.’ Small mistakes may not be problematic, but big and embarrassing ones are more challenging to deal with.

The fact that you make a mistake is less significant than how you deal with it. You can deal with it in a way that makes things worse, or you can turn the failure into a learning opportunity. Indeed, after you recover from failure, you can celebrate it and use it to reinforce communications and procedures, so others will be less likely to repeat the same mistake in the future.

Here are a few tips for turning failure into a learning opportunity:

• Before you start blaming and tormenting yourself and apologizing to the entire world, find out exactly what caused the mistake. It may have been your fault, but it may also have been the result of a systemic problem.
• Avoid carrying the guilt and blaming yourself forever, unless you really enjoy `beating yourself up.’ At some point you need to forgive yourself and move on.
• If someone immediately assigns blame to you and demands an apology, you can say:
  “I have no difficulty apologizing, as long as I know what I am apologizing for. Right now I don’t know enough about the problem to give you an intelligent answer. Can I find out exactly what happened and get back to you?”
• If it was indeed your fault, leave your ego behind and do not hesitate to say: “I’m sorry.” It takes confidence to admit you made a mistake. The key is to learn from your mistakes and move on. As long as your overall performance is exemplary, and as long as mistakes are the exception and not a repeated pattern, you are doing fine.
• Ask yourself: “What caused me to make this error, and what can I do to avoid repeating it? Should I have listened better? Should I have paid more attention to my e-mails?”
• Ask whether there are systemic problems within the organization that make people prone to making such mistakes, e.g.: The lack of checks and balances, the lack of accountability, poor listening, the lack of regular feedback, or poorly defined policies and procedures.
• Who is to blame is relatively unimportant, and that’s why apologizing should not be an issue. The key is to move beyond assigning blame to a person, and shift the focus to a systemic problem. A mistake can be used as an opportunity to strengthen policies and bridge systemic gaps that create risk for the organization. Upon analysis, you may be grateful that a relatively small failure occurred and revealed a serious systemic flaw that could have led to much worse failures.
• If your group has a history of always looking for guilty parties to blame, try this:
  “I can see that finding out exactly who is responsible for a failure may be significant to some of you. At the same time, it is usually not one individual that’s to blame, but also the system, the relationships, the policies and the procedures. Yes, assigning blame has its benefits, but we should be investing more energy in bridging the systemic gaps, so we can prevent these failures from happening in the future. How does this fit with you?”