How you deal with mistakes will define your business and your relationship with clients

Mistakes will happen, sure you can minimise these with better staff, better contractors, better systems, but where humans and human-built systems are involved mistakes will inevitably happen.

What is important is what you do next which can turn the mistake into a net benefit or a blow to your business, the confidence of your client and your credibility.

Here are some critical on dealing with mistakes in construction:

1. Own the mistake - even if you’re not sure who is at fault - take charge, start working towards a solution - it doesn’t matter who is to blame, Architect, Engineer Builder - Subcontractor.

2. Focus on a solution first - when a mistake happens we tend to try to jump into trying to work out the cause and assign responsibility - don’t do this. First engage the team to find a solution, the discussion about who was responsible, who will pay will come later and will be a much better conversation if there is already a solution in place.

3. Empathises and Acknowledge the error and its impacts: Say; “We made an error, I’m sorry this has been a bad experience.” Even if the error was not yours or your company it’s still ok to say “I’m sorry this has happened”

4. Don’t jump to explain and resolve on the spot - once you have acknowledged the mistake it’s totally fine to work through it and work out a solution with your team in an appropriate time frame. Avoid shoot from the hip explanations and on the spot workshopping.

5. Have a plan to present to the client - if you don’t have a plan yet - at the very least advise what actions you will take to come up with a plan, then come up with a plan and advise the client in due course.

6. Never Make excuses: “It looked right and I thought it was ok” , “I’m not sure why that didn’t work” , “I thought it should be ok” , “I didn’t know about this” etc - it’s so much better to say: yep we made a mistake, that was a mistake, we’ll sort it out. (full stop)

7. Explanation is fine - it’s totally ok to explain the cause of the mistake once established and be transparent - you can explain that there was an omission on the drawing and when the person read it they interpreted it this way…….but it’s important not to shrug responsibility - you need to always own the mistake.