How to Report a Mistake to Your Boss

Making mistakes – it’s a fact of life. Without mistakes or failure, there is no success. If you’ve never made a mistake, there’s a good chance you’re lying. It’s ok, everyone makes mistakes. I’ve made some in my time in the IT industry. The important thing is how to deal with them when you realise they have happened.
Take Responsibility and Admit the Mistake
The very first step is to take responsibility of the mistake. Sure, you may have a feeling of guilt, or fear, or confusion, when you discover something has gone wrong and you’re the person at fault. It may also be tempting to blame others – other team members for not picking it up, your boss for not monitoring it better, the system for not operating as you think it should.

However, the mature and professional thing to do is to own up and admit to your boss or manager that it was you that made the mistake. This kind of admission will, in the long run, be respected by your boss. The alte
ative is your boss finding out the mistake anyway and finding that you’re at fault – which is not a good situation to be in.
Explain How and Why, As Soon As Possible
There’s not a lot of point telling your boss that a mistake was made without knowing how or why it happened. They will most likely ask you these two questions anyway, after you mention it to them – “How did it happen? Why did it happen?”. Take some time to work out the answers to these two questions, and mention them to your boss when you report the mistake.

You may need consider the kind of mistake that has happened and the time taken to find the answer to these questions and the nature of your job. In some cases, it might be better to report the mistake first, and mention that you’ll look into how and why it happened straight away. If you’re doing support on a live system and every minute is critical, spending time working out these answers may impact the business and its system. In most cases, though, finding the how and why is the best thing to do first.

This also falls under giving effective status reports to your boss – you should tell them what they want to know and provide more details if they ask for it.
Provide a Solution
Along with how and why, the next question that needs to be asked is “What are we going to do to fix it?” This is arguable more important than the how and why. It’s no use reporting a mistake or problem and having no idea how to resolve it. If you’ve deleted a critical file accidentally, work out how you can restore it from the backup system and how long it will take. If you install the wrong code on the system, work out how you can revert to the correct code.

Both the solution and what’s involved are important to mention as your boss is more likely to be conce
ed about how to fix it than any disciplinary action on you.
Prevention

Once you have admitted the mistake, worked out the how and why, and what it takes to resolve it, you need to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Making a mistake is OK, it’s only human. The important thing is to learn from these mistakes. Making the same mistake again is not so good. Continually making the same mistake will cause questions to be asked – not good questions either!

You’ll need to work out how to prevent it from happening again in the future – not just for you but for anyone else in the team. Whether this is changing the process that you do things, getting more reviews from your team, or installing or configuring a system, putting it into place should help reduce these mistakes in the future.

Just remember – admitting to your mistakes, working out why they happened, resolving them and preventing them are very important things to learn and practice! Covering them up doesn’t help anyone and you’ll get found out eventually!