A healthy culture around mistakes is something many companies would say is simply part of a good workplace culture.
At least on paper.
The real test comes when something actually goes wrong. Because how people respond in that moment often says far more about a company’s culture than any mission statement, company value or carefully worded “It’s okay to make mistakes here.”
Most companies would probably agree with that statement straight away. After all, nobody wants to create a workplace where employees are so afraid of making mistakes that they would rather not make decisions at all. We want people to take ownership, come up with new ideas, be open, try things out and take responsibility.
Especially in start-ups and growing companies, that’s simply part of everyday life. Things get tried, scrapped, adjusted and reconsidered. There isn’t a process for every possible situation yet – and sometimes, that’s actually quite refreshing.
In theory, creating a healthy culture around mistakes sounds pretty simple.
Things get more interesting on an ordinary Tuesday morning when an important email hasn’t gone out, a deadline has been missed or a decision simply turns out to have been the wrong one. Maybe a client is unhappy. Maybe the mistake costs the company money or affects other people on the team.
And eventually, someone says the sentence nobody particularly enjoys saying:
“That was my mistake.”
What happens next is where things get interesting.
Of course, you can write on your careers page that mistakes are opportunities to learn. You can define company values, run workshops and talk about how important openness is. But whether people actually feel comfortable admitting a mistake isn’t decided on the careers page.
It’s decided by what happened the last time they did.
Was the immediate response an irritated “How could this happen?” Did everyone first try to work out who was responsible? Did an email suddenly start circulating with a surprisingly large number of people in CC?
Or was the first response:
“Okay. How do we fix this?”
It sounds like a small difference.
For the person who has just admitted to making a mistake, it can be a pretty big one.
What Does a Healthy Culture Around Mistakes Actually Look Like?
At its core, it’s fairly simple:
A healthy culture around mistakes shows in how people treat each other when something goes wrong.
Problems can be raised early. People can take responsibility without immediately being put in the firing line. Mistakes aren’t ignored; they’re discussed – with the aim of solving the problem and learning from it.
That doesn’t mean celebrating mistakes. And it certainly doesn’t mean simply letting them slide.
It’s easy to talk about company culture when everything is going well. The numbers look good, projects are on track, clients are happy and there aren’t any major conflicts within the team.
The more revealing moments tend to be the ones when something isn’t working.
Imagine two teams. The same thing happens in both: a decision was made that, in hindsight, turns out to have been the wrong one and costs the company money.
In the first team, the search for the person responsible begins immediately: Who made the decision? Who knew about it? Why wasn’t the manager informed earlier? Shouldn’t someone have noticed?
In the second team, the first question is:
“What do we need to do now to solve the problem?”
Of course, they also talk about how the mistake happened. Maybe a process needs to be adjusted. Maybe important information was missing. Or perhaps the decision really was careless. Those things can and should be addressed too.
The difference isn’t that mistakes don’t matter in the second company. It’s how people deal with them.
And employees remember that.
Someone who has experienced that being open about a mistake was more uncomfortable than the mistake itself will probably think twice before raising a problem early next time.
Someone who has seen mistakes taken seriously without anyone immediately being labelled the culprit is much more likely to say: “Something’s going wrong here. We should take a look at it.”
For companies, that kind of openness is incredibly valuable.
After all, a mistake nobody knows about is surprisingly difficult to fix.
A Healthy Culture Around Mistakes Doesn’t Mean “Anything Goes”
Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about dealing openly with mistakes is that being understanding means suddenly having to let everything slide.
We see it differently.
A healthy culture around mistakes doesn’t mean there can’t be consequences. Nor does it mean every decision was automatically the right one simply because it was made with good intentions.
There are avoidable mistakes. There is negligence. And there are situations where expectations simply haven’t been met.
Of course, there are also moments when a manager needs to say very clearly:
“This shouldn’t have happened.”
What matters is what comes next.
Is the goal to find someone to blame as quickly as possible? Or is it to understand what happened, take responsibility and make sure the same mistake doesn’t happen three more times?
Empathy and clear expectations aren’t mutually exclusive. That’s something that matters to us at allaboutHRLaw in general.
HR doesn’t have to choose between “We’re all one big family” and a 48-page rulebook.
You can be empathetic and still speak plainly. You can show understanding while also expecting people to take responsibility.
Really, that should be a given.
Unfortunately, it isn’t always.
Why Mistakes Are Part of Good Companies
At this point, we’d love to introduce the ultimate HR process that completely eliminates mistakes from companies.
Unfortunately, we don’t have one.
And to be fair, we’d probably be a little suspicious of it if we did.
Wherever people work, mistakes happen – even to excellent employees, experienced managers, founders and business owners.
And yes, of course, also to people whose job it is to give other people HR advice.
If you make decisions, you can make the wrong one. If you take responsibility, you can overlook something. If you try new things, you may discover that an idea sounded considerably better in theory than it works in practice.
Especially in a dynamic environment, that’s simply part of the job.
We work with a lot of start-ups and growing companies. And we often see a way of working that we really like: pragmatic, fast and solution-oriented.
People try things, learn as they go and often build structures only when they’re genuinely needed.
Of course, that doesn’t mean chaos is automatically innovative.
A missing process doesn’t become any better just because you call it “agile.”
But equally, we don’t believe every conceivable problem needs to be prevented in advance with another new rule.
A healthy culture around mistakes therefore needs both: enough structure for people to know where they stand and enough trust for them to act independently.
What Changes When People Can Talk Openly About Mistakes
A healthy culture around mistakes doesn’t prevent mistakes.
But it can change how quickly a company finds out about them and what happens afterwards.
When employees raise problems early, teams can respond faster. When mistakes can be discussed openly, people can learn from them. And when people don’t have to fear the reaction to every wrong decision, taking responsibility in the first place becomes much easier.
Or, more simply:
A healthy culture around mistakes doesn’t make mistakes good. It makes the way we deal with them better.
Managers Set the Tone
Company values matter. But what really counts is what people experience in their everyday working lives – and managers play an enormous role in that.
This becomes particularly clear in the first few minutes after something has gone wrong.
A manager whose first question is “Who did this?” sends a very different signal from one who asks:
“What do we need right now to fix this?”
That doesn’t mean responsibility is irrelevant. But the order in which questions are asked – and the tone in which they’re asked – makes a difference.
It’s also worth taking a closer look at another sentence managers often use:
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
Of course, sooner would sometimes have been better. But if employees regularly wait before raising problems, perhaps the more interesting question is:
Why did waiting feel like the more comfortable option?
Maybe they’ve seen how other people were treated when something went wrong. Maybe there’s an expectation within the team that you should only raise a problem once you already have a complete solution.
Or perhaps the manager unintentionally gives the impression that bad news really doesn’t fit into their calendar right now.
Those experiences are exactly what shape a company’s culture around mistakes.
Not a sentence in the employee handbook.
Sometimes Admitting Mistakes Starts at the Top
Perhaps that’s why another surprisingly simple sentence is also part of good leadership:
“I was wrong.”
If managers expect their teams to talk openly about mistakes, it helps enormously if they can do the same themselves.
Not as a staged leadership moment, but simply when it’s true.
“I misjudged that.”
“That wasn’t a good decision.”
“I should have communicated that differently.”
Statements like these don’t automatically make a manager look weaker. More than anything, they show that nobody here has to pretend everything has always gone perfectly.
And for a healthy culture around mistakes, that may be more valuable than the next poster displaying the company values.
So, What Does HR Have to Do With It
Quite a lot – and at the same time, not everything.
HR can help create the conditions for a healthy culture around mistakes, support managers and help in difficult situations. HR can help prepare conversations, put conflicts into perspective and build structures that give people clarity and guidance.
What HR can’t do is decide on Monday that the company will have an open culture around mistakes from Tuesday onwards.
Culture can’t be rolled out like a new tool.
It develops in meetings, conversations and decisions. In the way feedback is given. In whether a manager can admit, “I was wrong.” And, of course, in those moments when things don’t go according to plan.
‘For us, that’s one of the reasons HR is so much more than contracts, recruiting and HR processes.
Of course, those things are part of it, and they need to work. But behind almost every HR issue, sooner or later, there’s a person.
Maybe it’s a manager who has to have a genuinely difficult conversation for the first time. Maybe it’s an employee who isn’t sure how openly they can raise a problem. Maybe it’s two people who have completely different perceptions of the same situation.
In those moments, a standard answer from the HR handbook rarely helps.
What does help is knowing the company, listening, understanding the situation and finding a solution together that makes sense professionally and works on a human level.
That’s how we see HR.
Five Questions to Understand How Your Company Deals With Mistakes
If you want to understand what your company’s culture around mistakes is really like, you probably don’t need a major workshop to get started.
A few honest questions may be enough:
- What happens here when someone openly admits a mistake?
- Do we look for a solution first – or someone to blame?
- Can our managers say, “I was wrong”?
- Do we genuinely learn from mistakes, or do we just talk about learning from them?
- Would employees rather share bad news today – or hope it somehow resolves itself by tomorrow?
That last question in particular can be uncomfortable.
Which is probably a good sign that it’s worth asking.
How We Think About It at allaboutHRLaw
We like companies that don’t want to be perfect, but want to get better.
And that’s how we think about HR too.
Not as a rulebook you impose on a company. Not as a process for the sake of having a process. And certainly not as a department that comes around wagging its finger the moment something doesn’t go according to plan.
The first thing we want to know is:
What makes your company tick?
How do you work together? What’s already working pretty well? Where are things getting difficult? And what do you actually need – rather than what some HR handbook theoretically says you should have?
Sometimes the answer is a new process. Sometimes a manager needs support. Sometimes an open conversation is enough.
And sometimes the best HR solution is surprisingly unspectacular.
That’s exactly what we like about our work.
Because ultimately, HR issues don’t happen in organisational charts, policies or PowerPoint slides.
They happen between people.
And people simply aren’t always perfectly predictable.
Thankfully.
How Healthy Is Your Company’s Culture Around Mistakes, Really?
Perhaps you don’t need a complicated test to get a sense of how your company really deals with mistakes.
One question is enough to start:
What happens in your company if someone says tomorrow: “That was my mistake”?
Does the room suddenly go uncomfortably quiet? Does the search for someone to blame begin immediately? Will the mistake still be brought up months later?
Or can it lead to a conversation where someone takes responsibility, a solution is found and everyone then considers what can be learned from it?
The answer probably tells you more about your company’s culture than any value displayed on an office wall.
And if it turns out that not everything is perfect yet, that might actually be a pretty good opportunity to practise exactly the kind of culture we’ve been talking about.
Because company culture is allowed to make mistakes too.
And then learn and evolve
Do you feel like something in your company isn’t quite working?
Whether it’s leadership, collaboration or HR structures: we start by looking at how your company actually works – and then at what will genuinely help.