Jeremy Clarkson. A tall and hairy jar of Marmite that you either love or hate. He got a bit punchy over a lack of hot food recently - the latest mistake in a long list of high-speed blunders by the big man.
But let's park Clarkson for a minute and look at the broader issue of making mistakes at work - and the best way of bouncing back from them.
Cyborgs
It’s commonly accepted that unless we’re perfectly programmed cyborgs of the future, we all make mistakes. But that’s not a whole lot of consolation when you realise you’ve made one. It’s like the butterflies from a first date, break-up, food poisoning and hangover all rolled into one. Immense panic grips your gut as you realise you pressed send on an email you really shouldn’t have. Or a client calls to say you missed the mark on a vital project.
The good news is that the way you deal with your mistake is often more important than the error itself. How you react will make the people affected draw conclusions about your ability to cope in a crisis. Do it well and your mistake could be the best thing that ever happened to you.
What not to do
First of all, avoid extreme reactions. You might be tempted to bury your mistake, deny involvement or - at the other end of the scale - repeatedly apologise to the point of annoying the hell out of everyone. Like belts and the equator, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
How to react with style and bounce back
For me, the key is to acknowledge and accept you’ve made a mistake as quickly as possible. Next, work out two or three solutions for limiting or repairing the damage, along with a couple more that reduce the risk of you making the same mistake again. When you need to have that difficult conversation about your mistake, you’ll get a much better reaction if you can show you have a ready-to-go emergency action plan. It shows you’re positive, intelligent, calm, serious, proactive and lots of other impressive and employable adjectives.
It’s also important to be objective. When a client criticises your work, it’s instinctive to think of all the reasons why you’re great and they’re wrong. But be honest. I’d say in at least 99pc of cases (let’s leave a small margin for us to be right), there’s no smoke without fire. You probably have missed the brief to some extent or are in some way culpable.
Consider what you could have done better - but also scrutinise whether there were external factors that prevented you from doing so. Perhaps the brief was non-existent and you did your best in difficult circumstances. Or perhaps you took an approach that has served you well in the past, only for it to miss the stumps this time.
Don’t look back in anger - look forward and think about how you can make sure it won’t happen again.
Sticks
Perspective is good, too. Thrashing yourself with sticks for days on end over a fairly small error is never a good idea. Far better, if you normally do a good job, is to put your mistake down to experience, learn from it and move on. However professional and experienced you are, sometimes you just get it wrong. If you do a great job most of the time, your colleagues and clients will forgive the occasional blip. None of us are robots and the normal swing and sway of professional life leaves us open to the occasional error.
Let’s take a quick look at a few people in the public eye who’ve made mistakes - and see what they did to recover.
Jeremy Clarkson
We have to start with Mr C. As making gaffes at work goes, he’s the undisputed champion. He’s offended Argentinians, Mexicans and badgers, compared a Ferrari he didn’t like to people with ‘special needs’ and made a number of alleged racial slurs during filming. He’s rarely apologised, apart from in that irritating mock boys’ club way he does on Top Gear. But, until now, it had done little to harm his career. However, his recent attack on a Top Gear producer over lack of access to a hot meal finally brought out his remorseful, contrite side. I think it’ll probably work for him. He clearly feels in the wrong on this one and responded accordingly with an apologetic phone call to his BBC bosses. This one feels like a genuine apology. And I think that’s the key. It doesn’t really matter what’s gone before. Every mistake is different and needs to be treated in its own careful way. In the case of the biggest cock-ups, a genuine apology could save your job.
Gareth Bale
Real Madrid’s Welsh wing wizard had lost his magic. As an outsider, he was an easy scapegoat for Real’s fans as their form fell to pieces. But he brushed off his mistakes - bad performances and missed opportunities - to slap two goals past Levante at the weekend. After the game, he rolled out some familiar football cliches - but actually, they kind of made sense. If you take your professional life ‘one game at a time’ and always aim to perform well, your rare mistakes will be forgiven. And you’ll find it easier to put the blips behind you.
Grant Shapps
While the mistakes you or I make might feel epic, you can take heart by comparing them to gaffes on a grander scale. Think about the Tesco accountants who allegedly fiddled the books, the bankers who gambled with our money and brought the global economy down - or Grant Shapps, the Conservative Party chairman who swore blind he didn’t have a second job during his ministerial reign. But guess what? He did have a job as a ‘millionaire marketeer’ for a full year after he became an MP. But he forgot.
We’re all programmed to fight our corner when we’re being attacked, but there’s really nothing to be gained from telling a big fat lie to defend your reputation. You’ll be found out and you'll lose your credibility. Without those, you don’t have much of a professional standing. So until the cyborgs take over, we're all liable to make the odd mistake. Hold your hands up, accept you’re human and try to steer clear of doing it again.
We'd love to hear what you think. What gaffes have you made at work and how did you put them behind you? Leave your comments below.