Work meeting about a mistake

[MrsMenmen]

Tell me I'm being oversensitive please- I had a small issue at work where I did everything I could of but didn't get the results that were expected yesterday. My boss spoke to me about this, she then also called a team meeting straight away and said to everyone hat we need to make sure we are getting the right results, which was clearly about me as I was the one having the issue. Am I unreasonable to feel a tiny bit upset by that meeting?

Are you sure you were the only one who'd made the mistake? Could it be that your manager identified a trend in your team, in which case a team meeting would be a good way to address this.

No it was definitely me and just made me feel so crap

Think of what you'd do in that situation as the boss. Would you call a meeting to discuss, to go through if anything could have been done different etc? Or would you have just left it.

But was it specific to that exact mistake?

Perhaps this was just the last in a long line of simple mistakes made by members of staff and the boss just wanted to remind everyone to be careful.

Unless she directly referred to you then don't taken it to heart

You're not unreasonable to feel upset, but it's hard to say more without really knowing what happened. If she called a team meeting, it might be that you weren't the first to make the mistake.

Presumably your manager didn't tell everyone you had made the mistake?

I absolutely would have used one mistake as a concern & asked the whole team to be cautious / provide training on how to get it right. My view is that we are a team and so we should all be there to help each other.

If it was something that I am confident everyone knows, and you should have got right - then it would have been a formal 1:1 with you instead with a development plan. An open team meeting suggests it wasn't that...

I would try (try, as I know it’d be hard) not to take it personally.

It could be that seeing as you’d done everything you could it’s a knotty problem and maybe your boss is trying to crowdsource how to mitigate the problem in the future (tricky issues benefit different perspectives)?

Or, as others have said, could be a generalised issue in the team (although I understand your issue was specific to you).

I think I would try (!) to go into the meeting with an open mindset - you did your best with the circumstances you had but be open to learning - but I would really hope it was framed as a wider issue than just your specific outcome!

It's unlikely that it's just about you. She spoke to you separately. If she raised it with it's team,then it's most likely that you weren't the only one, or even if you were on this occasion, she probably feels that it could also apply to the others too & wants to prevent that.

I suppose it also depends on the industry/context. In the medical field an individual mistake that led to an adverse result is going to be 100% looked at by the whole team (or should be) in clinical governance meetings. This is to ensure the whole team knows about the potential pitfall and making sure it doesn't happen again (if one team member made the mistake and it was never addressed with the entire team and solutions to try and avoid it happening again aren't found/communicated, it would be very easy for another team member to make the same/similar mistake and in some instances as in the medical field that's just not good enough). I could imagine same would ensue in a lot of industries, were a bad result may affect people quite negatively (social services, financial services etc).

You’re not unreasonable to get upset, it’s not nice to get something wrong and be pulled up on it, even if it’s reasonable to do so. However, it’s how you respond that marks you out. Put it down to experience, try to learn lessons if there are any, and crack on.