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How to act with the coworker who does not recognize their mistakes
Psychology
We discovered with the psychologist José Miguel Sánchez the signs to identify bosses and colleagues who do not accept their mistakes, the cost of having them in the team and what we should do in this situation
Albert Einstein said that a person who did not make a mistake, never tried anything new. In fact, one of the things that people who find it hard to admit their mistakes have in common is their fear of taking risks and vision of error as failure, rather than seeing it as an apprenticeship. According to José Miguel Sánchez, a «motivational speaker» specialized in work psychology, these are individuals who, in general, do not want to leave their comfort zoneand that they prefer not to risk even though they know that they will not evolve with that attitude.
Another of the profiles that finds it difficult to recognize an error is the person who consider that you know everything and who believes that he cannot afford to be wrong. “These people will do everything in their power so that the error cannot be attributed to them: lie or even blame others if they consider it necessary,” he adds.
One of the reasons for this comportamiento (both the one that doesn’t want to get out of their comfort zone and the one who thinks they know everything) is that some people confuse the tangible fact of making a mistake with the psychological interpretation of “failure.” But this, according to the psychologist, only occurs in people influenced by the insecurity that generates them to have the feeling that they do not do things as expected of them.
Signs to identify who is hiding their mistakes
His words give him away. In fact, the expert assures that they most likely use regrets or justifications to try to hide their mistakes or to keep them away from them. They will communicate with expressions of this type: «I did everything I could», «it is not my fault», «nobody had told me», «I did not know anything» or with sentences that begin with «is that: is that my boss, is that my client, is that the supplier… ». José Miguel Sánchez calls the latter “skezophrenic” because, as he explains, they are people who end up turning their way of communicating into a pseudo pathology.
Signs to identify someone who blames others for their mistakes
In the field of psychology, reference is made to people who have a “External locus of control”In other words, everything that happens to them is caused by others. Therefore, according to the expert, this type of person would blame others that he or she had made a mistake. “They usually hold others responsible for their own failures. Them they are never to blame and it is always others who caused them to err, “he says.
In this sense, the expert warns of this type of behavior from an early age. The typical phrase “the teacher has a mania for me” is a good indication that this type of behavior has been developing since childhood or adolescence.
The cost of having them on a team
Conflict. This is the word that always appears when someone is not capable of assuming the responsibility they have within a team. The consequences of this, as the psychologist explains, is that if he does not assume that responsibility, it will hardly flow in his way of managing tasks, he will not solve obstacles and, therefore, slow down the evolution of team members or simply slow it down. «If standards of honesty y transparency, the team can pay the cost of having one or more people who do not accept their mistakes ”, clarifies Sánchez.
What do I do if my colleagues don’t acknowledge their mistakes?
The expert’s advice in this situation is accumulate evidence that our work is done in the way it was expected. “The more evidence we have in writing or in the presence of other people, the better, because when we only have our opinion to confront that of the other person, we will have more difficulties in achieving our purpose,” he explains.
But it is also important to talk to that person and confront them because, as José Miguel Sánchez recalls, there is no one better than oneself to defend oneself against an injustice that is being committed against the work that they do.
What if the boss made the mistake?
Having a boss who does not accept his mistakes implies a higher risk of not achieving our goals. And faced with this situation, it is not only necessary to accumulate evidence and witnesses that we have carried out our work correctly, but two questions must also be questioned, according to the psychologist.
The first is to seriously think about whether I want to continue working with that boss. In this case, the possibilities of changing departments or areas within the company should be studied or even the possibility of changing companies should be considered.
The second is to accept that this is the boss you have and analyze the positive things that it has to work with that person. “If things like learning, projects and responsibilities that we have been involved in because of it weigh on the scale, it can be accepted and therefore could be handled in a way that is not harmful,” he explains.
Finally, it is always possible to talk to the boss and try to manage his behavior in a assertive and beneficial to both.
How to accept my own mistakes
We start from a base: «errare humanum est», the Latin expression (now converted into an aphorism) that means “To err is human” and that it alludes precisely to the fact that being wrong is considered something intrinsic to human nature. And having said that, we also connect it with Albert Einstein’s phrase to which we alluded at the beginning: “The person who did not make a mistake, never tried anything new.” Why? Well, because as José Miguel Sánchez explains when one tries new, unknown or more difficult things than usual, the risk of failing will always be implicit. However, the expert invites that failure is what will make us grow and what will give us the possibility of learning things that before we did not know we could do or that we had not even imagined trying.
When we are not afraid of failure, life is better lived. “If we face challenges for what they are, opportunities to continue growing, we will see the mistakes we make as learning, like when we were children,” reveals Sánchez.
This is precisely the technique that the psychologist proposes to live life with courage, making mistakes and trying new things: remembering what we thought when we were children, well then …
– We weren’t afraid to do different things. We were naturally curious.
– We were exploring new possibilities. We were discovering the world.
– When we were wrong, we tried it again and in a different way than it did not work for us.
– We were not conditioned by past experience. We tried to motivate ourselves with what is to come and that will motivate us more than the above.
– We were fleeing the monotony. We tried new options. And the fact that they were not all satisfactory was part of our development as people.
“When we remember the powerful child that we all were, managing mistakes and transforming them into learning becomes a much simpler task,” he clarifies.