I Don't Trust People Who Don't Make Mistakes

The Spotless Record Is the Red Flag

Something happened at work recently that stuck with me. A colleague discovered that a variable in a shared system had been changed, and it caused a downstream problem that took a few hours to untangle. When we traced it back, the most likely culprit was someone who had been working in that area of the code a few days earlier. They came back with: "I don't remember doing it, but if I was the one working there, it must have been me."

That was it. No defensive spiral, no pointing at the process, no waiting to see if someone else would take the heat. Just a clean acknowledgment followed immediately by: "What can we do to make sure this never happens again?"

I've been in the workforce for over thirty years. I've sat across the table from thousands of candidates, managed hundreds of people, and run more post-mortems than I care to count. That response, the one my colleague gave, is rarer than it should be. And every time I see it, I trust that person more.

Here's the flip side of that, and it's the thing I want to spend some time on: if someone has never made a mistake, or at least never admitted to one, that is not a sign of excellence. It is a warning sign.

The Three Possibilities

When someone presents you with a spotless record, only three explanations fit.

The first is that they haven't been tested hard enough. They've been operating inside safe boundaries, doing work that doesn't push them to the edge of their competence. You don't actually know what they do when the wheels come off, because the wheels have never come off in their presence. That's not a green flag, it's an unknown.

The second is that they're coasting. They've calibrated their effort to avoid failure rather than to achieve something. There's a version of this that looks like consistency from the outside and looks like risk aversion from the inside. These people hit their targets reliably, but they never stretch past them, and if you give them a genuinely hard problem, you'll find out fast.

The third is that they're hiding. And that one is the most dangerous by a significant margin.

A person who hides mistakes is operating on a simple calculation: the cost of disclosure is higher than the cost of concealment. That calculation usually turns out to be wrong, but by the time the math catches up with them, the mistake has had time to compound. A small problem that gets disclosed on day one costs you an afternoon. The same problem that gets concealed for two weeks costs you a whole lot more, and now you've also got a trust problem on top of the original issue.

The part that makes this hard is that hiders are often high performers in the short term. They manage up well. They hit their numbers. They look polished. The cracks don't show until there's real pressure, and by then the damage is already done.

What You're Really Asking When You Ask About Mistakes

In a hiring context, I ask about mistakes directly. I ask people to tell me about a time they failed at something significant, and then I watch what happens.

Some people tell me about a failure that wasn't really their fault. They walk me through a situation where they made a reasonable decision and external circumstances went sideways, and they spend most of the story explaining the external circumstances. That's not a mistake story, that's a bad luck story with a polished ending.

Some people tell me about a failure and spend the first ninety percent of their answer explaining why it happened and only get to what they learned in the last ten seconds. The ratio matters. If the majority of the answer is context and explanation and the minority is accountability and change, I'm not hearing what I need to hear.

What I'm actually looking for is three things, and they have to come in a specific order.

Ownership before deflection. The person has to start by accepting that this was on them, not by describing the conditions that made it hard. You can acknowledge complexity without leading with it.

Root cause before excuse. There's a difference between "here's why this happened" and "here's why it wasn't my fault." Real root cause analysis is curious and honest. It's trying to understand the mechanism of failure so you can prevent it. Excuse-making is trying to reduce your culpability. They can sound similar, but they feel completely different.

And then the question, either asked or answered: what did we do to make sure this doesn't happen again? That last piece is the one that separates people who learn from failure from people who survive it. Surviving failure is table stakes. Learning from it is what actually matters.

The Management Side of This

If you're managing people and you've built a culture where mistakes feel dangerous to admit, you have a much bigger problem than you probably realize.

Think about what you're actually incentivizing. Every time someone discloses a mistake and gets penalized for it, every other person on your team is watching. They're updating their model of how this organization works. The message lands whether you intend it or not: mistakes are things you hide here, not things you surface.

And once that norm is established, it is genuinely hard to undo. People have to believe the environment has changed before they'll change their behavior, and that belief only comes from watching other people disclose mistakes and seeing it go well for them. That takes time and consistency.

The antidote isn't celebrating mistakes, I want to be clear about that. Rewarding failure for its own sake is its own kind of dysfunction. What you're trying to reward is disclosure and ownership and the follow-through on "here's what we're changing." That's the behavior you want, and that's the behavior you have to make safe.

The fastest way to do that is to go first. When you make a mistake, say so plainly. Don't over-perform the humility, but don't gloss over it either. Walk your team through what happened, what you got wrong, and what you're doing differently. Do it enough times and the norm starts to shift.

The Bottom Line

An unblemished record should make you curious, not confident. It's not evidence of excellence, it's evidence that you're missing information.

The people I've trusted most over the course of my career have all made mistakes in front of me. Not constantly, and not sloppily, but they've all had moments where something went wrong and they chose to own it instead of obscure it. That choice, made clearly and without drama, is one of the strongest signals of character I know.

What you actually want is someone who pushes hard enough to fail occasionally, owns it clearly when they do, and treats every failure as a data point worth understanding. That's the profile that compounds over time.

The spotless record is theater. The honest mistake, well handled, is the real thing.