[jmts]

Admitting I'm wrong or that I screwed up ... You would not believe how much smoother everything at work is when you learn to recognize early the signs that you're holding on to a bad opinion, or that you're headed towards a fuckup, and just saying it out loud.

Avoiding judgement of those that have screwed up or have done something wrong, and simply working with them to correct it goes hand-in-hand with this. By the time someone admits they did something wrong, they already know what they did - by dwelling on that you're just wasting time and energy.

I wonder occasionally how many problems there are in the world that have become much bigger than they needed to be simply because the person who messed up knows the news won't be received well, so they keep their screw up hidden. Similarly, I wonder how effectively we teach children this kind of dishonesty by teaching them that honesty results in punishment.

[wccrawford]

Also, forgive them!

I hate it when people hold something against someone forever, even though they've already admitted fault. If they get punished even if they repent, there's no incentive to ever repent again. They might as well just keep doing bad things because there's no difference for them.

[brigandish]

One of my favourite maxims is, be hard on the problem, not the person.

[celticmusic]

depends on the screwup. You can separate them into the categories of reasonable and unreasonable.

pushing to production at 5pm on a friday is not a reasonable screwup, and I absolutely will let you know if get called in to fix something that should have waited until Monday.

[jmts]

Sure, there are absolutely varying degrees of screw up. You can make the same argument for anything. But for any position there is usually a general rule, and any number of exceptions.

The point here is that the general rule for human error should tend toward compassion, because the vast majority of mistakes people make are not that serious. In my world at least it seems that we prefer to tend toward punishment instead.