Responsibility in the Workplace (or, "Hitting a DevOops")

Things go wrong.

That's a universal truth. We can make plans and anticipate problems, but in the end, "Best laid plans of mice and men" will occasionally leave you feeling as if you have little consolation outside the use of salty language and a desire to crawl into the corner of a server room for a few hours.

The important thing to remember is that it's the reaction to things going wrong that will be judged. The fact that something went wrong cannot be be changed; what's done is done.

In terms of the workplace, here are the steps I try to remember:

1. Take responsibility. Own up to the mistake, if it was your mistake (or your area of responsibility.) Was the task yours to maintain? Were you in charge of managing whatever went south? Maybe you just plain screwed up...you were supposed to order something, and you forgot, for example. Passing it off on someone else or implying it was someone else's fault you didn't follow through just makes you an unreliable douchecanoe.
2. Apologize for the mistake. Not in a passive, blame-shifting manner, like those idiots that make a passive aggressive acknowledgement that you're sorry that XYZ feels bad in a crafty attempt to make a non-apology. Apologize in a way that acknowledges your responsibility in the situation.
3. Once responsibility is acknowledged, let it go. Responsibility is one thing. Dwelling on it is just wallowing in blame. Blame will not help the situation. You now have a problem to solve. Focus on the problem at hand.
4. Rectify the situation. Identify what is wrong, and do what has to be done to make it right. This could be as simple as ordering what was forgotten (expediting the order, if possible) or maybe you'll need to find a workable solution with someone in a team affected by the problem.
5. Identify the source of the screw-up. Why did you overlook this? What factors contributed to it? Of course there are times when the problem stemmed from you making a silly mistake. Other times the problem came from a series of failures that maybe you couldn't reasonably foresee. The important thing is to ask yourself if there is a point where this failure could have been reasonably caught and mitigated before it became a problem.
6. Revise procedures. Maybe you need to add an item to a procedure checklist. Maybe you need to rely on organized lists. Maybe it's time to overhaul a workflow, or work with others in a team to create a check and balance mechanism.
7. Communicate the changes. Tell your manager and others affected by the mistake what will be done in the future so that this mistake will hopefully not be repeated. This shows that you're proactive and taking steps to learn from your mistakes.

This is a basic guideline I try to apply to workplace screw-ups. There are variations to these guidelines, but I try to keep the goals in mind when something goes wrong. Some businesses codify the spirit of these items with some form of post-mortem analysis of a situation, other businesses seem to leave it up to the individual to form some solution and move on, happy enough that the problem has been (hopefully) addressed.


In the end, the goals are the same.

• Acknowledge your responsibility and apologize
• Rectify the situation at hand
• Analyze what led up to the mistake being made
• Prevent it from happening again, if possible
• Communicate the changes you're making to prevent future mistakes going forward

 Life is messy. Things happen. Things go wrong. Acknowledge, and move on. Just...try not to let it happen again.