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A manager in Austin told me to never admit a mistake to my team
I was leading a project last year and gave a junior analyst the wrong data set, which set us back two full days. The manager's view was that showing weakness hurts your authority. I told the analyst exactly what happened, apologized, and we worked late to fix it together. He actually seemed to trust me more after that. Now I'm curious if that manager's advice is common, or if being upfront about errors is better for team morale long-term. What's your take?
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the_henry3mo ago
What did that manager think would happen?
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keith2642mo ago
Double down on the blame shift and act like @theaward is overreacting. Honestly sounds like classic mismanagement where they thought they could just wing it and hope nobody noticed the mess. Concrete example: had a former boss who tried to "streamline" our ticket system by deleting half the fields. Took three weeks to undo the chaos and lost a ton of customer data in the process. The real kicker is they never even apologized, just acted like it was a learning experience for everyone else.
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