• You will hear five people talking about a mistake they made at work, and about how they responded afterwards. • For each extra

Speaker One
Woman: I organise IT projects, and hire other companies or individuals to do the work. With one, the contractor told me halfway through that it couldn’t be done the way I’d planned it, and it would be overdue. I took a chance that he was wrong, but he wasn’t, and it really inflated the cost of the project, because of course the contractor’s staff had to be paid for longer. When my boss found out, I only managed to keep my job by suggesting that I email him weekly progress reports on any future projects, and notify him of any potential or actual problems. It really helped me too, because I think if you make a mistake, you shouldn’t just say, ’It won’t happen again’, you have to make sure it doesn’t.
Speaker Two
Man: I worked for a publisher where you were allocated an art editor per issue from a studio team. I always got the useless one, because everyone else refused to work with him: he was so bad he should never have been given the job in the first place. In the end, I suddenly snapped, and instead of having a quiet word with my boss, as I should have done, I dashed off a furious memo about him to the head of his department. Well, that put me in the wrong, everyone was very angry with me, and I came very close to resigning. It certainly taught me not to rush into things: what seems the obvious course of action in the heat of the moment isn’t necessarily the most effective one.
Speaker Three
Woman: When I worked in import-export, the best thing I ever did was getting myself transferred from one section to another. It happened because I’d calculated how much we should charge a customer for some goods we were going to import on a regular basis, and didn’t allow for our agent’s commission. When the invoices started coming in, I realised we were making a loss. I tried to increase the price to the customer without telling my boss, but, in the end, I had to admit what I’d done, and I think that’s the only reason I didn’t get the sack. It gave us quite serious cash flow problems for a Jew months. But it made me realise that I really wasn’t interested in that side of the work.
Speaker Four
Man: I used to work in a catering company, and was promoted to Catering Manager, but at first I just kept on messing around with the rest of my staff. My duties included doing the rounds when everyone else had left. One evening, one of my staff put several thousand pounds’ worth of frozen food in a fridge by mistake. I should have discovered this, but I didn’t, and the next day the food was ruined. When I told my boss, I treated it as a joke, and put the blame on the person who’d made the mistake. My boss made it clear that I was ultimately answerable for what my staff did, and if my attitude didn’t change I’d be out of a job. Needless to say, it did change, and quickly.
Speaker Five
Woman: I used to work in a PR agency, doing publicity for lots of celebrities, and we were always too busy to pool our knowledge. Eventually, I instituted a working lunch once a week, to swap the latest information. I’d realised that we needed something like that when I was publicising one of our clients, and gave a journalist from a national newspaper the phone number of the person I thought was the client’s booking agent. What I didn’t know, but some of my colleagues did, was that the client had changed agents, so the wrong one then got hundreds of calls. He was furious, so were our client and her new agent, and so was my boss. All I wanted was to hide away somewhere until it all blew over.