In my experience, one of the most persistent sources of interpersonal conflict is the inability to own up to and correct mistakes. Our first impulse may be to conceal an error, or to deny it exists. We may try to shift the fault and blame it on the negligence of others. We may be paralyzed by embarrassment, shame or a sense of personal failure. Or, perhaps, we just don’t know what to do.

Dumb Little Man presents a remarkable story of one lawyer’s workplace error — missing a critical filing deadline, every attorney’s nightmare — and describes the courageous steps she took to make things right in “How to Recover from a (Big) Mistake at Work“. While avoiding mistakes in the first place is important, it’s a mark of character and rare ingenuity to fix one — making her the kind of lawyer I’d want to hire.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 4:09 pm and is filed under Conflict Resolution, Popular Culture, Politics, Society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.