Mistakenly Mistaken: The Fine Art of the Boo Boo
Denise A. Roistacher • April 15, 2025
Mistakes are part of leadership — but how you respond defines your leadership.
When you’re a leader, mistakes are inevitable. Whether it’s a dropped deadline, a missed detail, or a poorly worded email—at some point, someone on your team will mess up. And when it happens, it’s rarely convenient. It’s the morning you’re already running late. The car won’t start. Coffee spills on your white shirt. And just as you’re catching your breath, your inbox pings—your senior leader is flagging a mistake your team made.
Your gut reaction might be blame. You didn’t do it. Someone else dropped the ball. And now you look bad.
In that moment, you have a choice.
You can react—or you can lead.
When the pressure is high and a mistake surfaces, the most tempting reaction is to find someone to blame. Taking the blame pathway can feel like a quick relief—distancing yourself from the problem, restoring a sense of control, or appeasing senior leaders. But this reactive choice comes at a hidden cost.
The Cost of Blame: What Happens When Leaders Point Fingers
When you take the path of react:
Blame feels satisfying in the moment. It creates a sense of distance—I didn’t do this, they did. But over time, blame is corrosive to team culture.
Here’s what happens when leaders default to blame:
• Psychological safety erodes.
Team members begin to hide mistakes rather than surface them. Transparency disappears. People stop taking healthy risks because the cost of failure feels too high.
• Trust fractures.
When someone gets thrown under the bus, everyone hears it. Even if they’re not the target today, they wonder if they’ll be next. Loyalty is replaced by self-protection.
• Innovation stalls.
Blame kills creativity. When people fear being wrong, they stop being bold. Mistakes are part of innovation—and if failure isn’t safe, neither is progress.
• Accountability gets distorted.
True accountability is about learning and improvement. Blame, on the other hand, is about punishment. One creates ownership. The other creates silence.
• You train your team to deflect.
If the norm is blame, team members start passing the buck instead of stepping up. Responsibility becomes a hot potato.
Blame might relieve a moment of discomfort, but it builds a culture of fear.
You can take a breath, resist the instinct to shield yourself, and step into the harder work: holding the space for accountability without shame, for learning without fear. In that moment, you model what real leadership looks like—not just when things are going well, but when they are messy, uncertain, and uncomfortable.
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Mistakes as a Mirror
Team mistakes are rarely just individual slip-ups. They’re often signals: of misaligned expectations, overwork, or unclear priorities.
Instead of asking
“Who messed up?”
Try asking
“What needs attention here?”
When a leader leads through a mistake with integrity, something powerful happens. The team learns they can be honest. They learn they can grow. And most importantly, they learn that leadership is not about being right—it’s about being in relationship.
That’s how you build a team that owns its work—and trusts each other through the hard moments.
Be the Archaeologist, Not the Judge
As a leader, resist the impulse to say, “Oh, my team made a mistake—again.”
It might feel honest. It might even feel like a way to show accountability. But what it communicates to stakeholders is this: “I’m not fully owning the system I lead.”
When a mistake happens, consider this:
Could it be pointing to something deeper?
- A gap in communication?
- A process that isn’t working?
- A misunderstanding that hasn’t been named?
Instead of defaulting to blame, stay curious. Approach the situation like an archaeologist. Your role is to gather the artifacts, examine the context, and ask the right questions to uncover the full story.
- What patterns are emerging?
- Where is clarity missing?
- How might my own leadership be shaping this outcome?
This isn’t about self-blame. It’s about structural thinking. When you treat mistakes as data—not drama—you lead in a way that builds engagement and trust.
So next time a stakeholder points out a flaw, don’t deflect. Invite the conversation. Own the ecosystem. And use the moment not to punish—but to improve.
That’s leadership with depth.
What Real Leadership Looks Like
Blaming might make you feel temporarily in control. But it doesn’t build trust. It doesn’t create safety. And it doesn’t help your team grow.
Real leadership means:
- Owning the outcome, together. You may not have made the mistake, but you lead the system where it happened.
- Being curious, not critical. Ask what happened, why it happened, and how it can be prevented—without assuming intent.
- Balancing accountability with empathy. Hold the bar high, and hold space for learning.
Protecting the relationship. The moment you choose connection over correction, you show your team that trust matters more than ego.
How a Coach Can Help: Turning Mistakes into Momentum
Leadership can feel lonely in the aftermath of a team mistake—especially when reputational stakes are high. That’s where coaching becomes invaluable.
An executive coach
offers a confidential, non-judgmental space to pause, reflect, and regroup. Here’s how coaching can support a leader through these moments:
Shift from reactivity to reflection.
A coach helps you move beyond the heat of the moment and explore what’s really going on—internally and systemically.
Interrupt the blame loop.
Coaching invites you to examine your assumptions, emotional triggers, and leadership patterns that may be influencing your response to mistakes.
Strengthen relational leadership.
Instead of defaulting to “Who’s at fault?”, a coach can guide you toward questions like:
What’s the relationship dynamic here? What trust needs to be rebuilt? What expectations weren’t clear?
See the system.
Coaches are trained to help leaders look beyond the individual and understand the structural or cultural factors that contribute to repeated errors.
Co-create a better response strategy.
Whether it’s preparing for a conversation with a stakeholder, repairing trust with a team member, or designing a more resilient process, coaching helps you respond with clarity, confidence, and care.
At its best, coaching transforms mistakes from moments of tension into opportunities for growth, connection, and leadership maturity.
Because the real goal isn’t to avoid mistakes. It’s to build a culture—and a leadership identity—that grows stronger through them.
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