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Any mistakes that I have seen or heard about are usually after they happen, and I don’t say anything and am rarely ever privileged enough to hear about what happens afterwards. Fortunately for me, mistakes I have made I caught quickly before they went to anyone else!
I'll be honest, anytime I know I have made a mistake at work I go directly to my boss and ask her how I can fix it. I just like to own up to it and see if it can be fixed rather than waiting to see if there will be any consequences. Thankfully I haven't made any HUGE mistakes but there have been a couple that we were able to catch and fix before it turned into something more major.
First year in data I watched a leading tableau consulting firm wipe out an entire tableau server instance on accident with no backups.
They ended up taking up the projects with their own resources for free to avoid legal action.
1) People generally know when they’ve screwed up and don’t need you chastising them. Save that for when they don’t accept responsibility or clearly don’t understand the error or its magnitude.
2) If possible, give them the chance to correct it. Some mistakes can’t be corrected, or need different resources to fix the issue. Errors should be turned into learning experiences.
3) Anytime an error causes the business to lose a significant amount of money (or potential money), there is a chance of consequences. A lot depends on the exact circumstances.
Twenty years ago, I was responsible for making an update to bottle deposits in a retail chain’s POS systems. Now, anytime there is a change in bottle deposit, or other relevant changes, it adds the item to a list of replacement shelf tags that need to be printed. In this case, that wasn’t needed because the bottle deposit change didn’t really affect POS but was more of a behind the scenes accounting update. Typically, we would schedule a change like this for an off-cycle update. That way, the stores could be alerted to just not print the tags for the off-cycle update.
But I forgot and scheduled the change for part of our regular cycle. So for every single beverage option in the store, a new tag printed unnecessarily. And they were mixed in with all of the regular cycle tags for price / promo changes. We are talking about hundreds of tags, if not thousands, that have to be hung on the shelf… manually… in nearly 2,000 stores. At the end of the day, it caused somewhere between $20,000 to $50,000 of additional labor costs. And a lot of stores sent hate mail into corporate.
When this was brought to my attention, I did not handle it the best, as I was early in my career and not used to making big mistakes and I panicked a bit. But my boss was relatively cool about it because many other people in that role, at one point or another, had done something similar. It was a common enough mistake that it didn’t stand out too much. But the important thing was that it was my first screw-up and I learned from it. If I continued making mistakes like that, I’m sure I would have heard about it and either been moved to another position or shown the door.
With nearly 2,000 stores this was clearly not a small business. $20k - $50k is not an insane amount to millions of shareholders in a billion-dollar business. But if you’re working for a small business that clears $500k in revenue and the owner only takes home about $100k, that’s seriously going to impact his bottom line and how much he can bring home to his family.