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Four Simple Steps to Workplace Redemption

By Lisa Woods (290 words)
Posted in Communication Skills on May 8, 2012

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Did you ever have an email you wished you never sent?  Or replied to the wrong person’s text with a love note? Can you relate to forwarding a negotiation strategy to your boss, but instead accidentally hitting reply to the person you were negotiating with? Maybe you aligned yourself with someone who just got let go instead of the one you are left to work with after a re-org?  Regrets, embarrassments and humiliations…the list goes on and on for most of us.  We have all been there; it makes your skin crawl, your heart stop and your blood pressure spike when it happens.

 

I am here to ease your mind.  There is life after these mishaps; you just need to have the right mindset to redeem yourself at work.

 

Step One:

Admit your mistake immediately!  Send another text or email to the victim of your antics explaining that you made a mistake, and to please ignore the last message.

 

Step Two:

Forgive yourself and laugh it off!  We all make mistakes.  Take a deep breath and move on.  If you forget it happened, others will too.

 

Step Three:

Slow down!  We make mistakes when we are moving to quickly.

 

Step Four: 

Remember - work is work, and life is life.  The workplace is the easiest place to redeem yourself, because in the end, everybody has somewhere else they would rather be.  (If you don’t, we will address that in another blog post!)

 

I hope you are able to test out these concepts and share your results with us.  Others can benefit from your experiences.    Good luck!

 

L.J. Woods

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Comments (2)

Marla Rosner posted on: May 8, 2012

I love your examples and tips for redemption. Also, if you catch a mistake quickly enough, Outlook has a function that enables you to retrieve email messages.

Matt B. posted on: May 9, 2012

Great comment Maria...'Message Recall' in Outlook is very useful. Also, with respect to LJ's step #3, I have a personal rule that for all e-mails that do not require an *urgent* reply: Compose/draft the e-mail, save it, close it out and wait at least an hour, or until the end of the day. Then, re-read it, edit as appropriate and send. You'll be amazed at the amount of unnecessary language that is in an "off-the-cuff" e-mail message.

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