Less Wrong Than Yesterday: Why Owning Your Mistakes Builds Trust in Professional Services
It’s Thursday afternoon and you’ve just found it. A figure in a client’s file that’s been sitting there wrong since the last lodgement. Nobody’s noticed. The client hasn’t asked. Your manager reviewed the job and signed it off.
You could fix it quietly next quarter, and part of you is already working out how.
That pull is normal, and it’s stronger right now than it’s been in years. AI is drafting work we spent years learning to do. TPB obligations keep tightening, and AML/CTF tranche 2 has reached accounting practices of every size since 1 July 2026. Clients are questioning fees they know they need but can no longer afford. When your role feels shakier than it did a year ago, owning a mistake can feel like handing someone a reason.
So we dig in and defend what we know.
Why is it so hard to admit you were wrong at work?
Because most of us were trained to believe our value is being right.
Accountants, bookkeepers, engineers and IT consultants all get paid for precision. Somewhere along the way, being correct stops being part of the job and becomes part of who we are. Then an error stops feeling like information and starts feeling like a verdict on us, and the instinct is to protect ourselves rather than the client.
Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on how people make judgements and decisions, saw it differently. He told the organisational psychologist Adam Grant, who shares the conversation in Think Again (2021):
“No one enjoys being wrong, but I do enjoy having been wrong, because it means I am now less wrong than I was before.”
His point is that the moment you find a mistake is the moment you get better, and that’s worth the discomfort.
Does admitting a mistake make you look less competent?
The research suggests the opposite, and so does my experience.
Owens, Johnson and Mitchell published a set of studies in Organization Science in 2013 on what they called expressed humility: being willing to see yourself accurately, including your mistakes and limits, recognising other people’s strengths, and staying open to learning. Leaders who showed it had teams that were more engaged and more satisfied in their work, and people were less likely to leave.
In client work, I see the same thing play out. The adviser who rings a client and says “I’ve found something I got wrong, here’s what it means and here’s how I’m fixing it” almost always comes out of that call with more trust, not less. The client learns something they couldn’t have learned any other way: that you’ll tell them when it matters.
It’s why I value humility so highly, and higher than ego.
What does being “less wrong” look like in practice?
It means owning up, admitting we’re wrong, and learning from it. Specifically:
• Going back to the client before they find it. If they find it first, they’ll start wondering what else they haven’t found.
• Telling your manager before the review does. It turns a correction into a conversation.
• Saying what you’ll change, not only what went wrong. That’s the part people remember.
• Asking yourself a quieter question first. When you feel the urge to dig in, ask: what might I be wrong about here?
That last one is where it starts for most of us. Owning up out loud is hard, and it rarely happens without that private question coming first.
How can business owners build a culture where people own their mistakes?
Go first. Your team is watching how you handle being wrong far more closely than anything you say about it.
If you’re a practice owner or run an engineering or IT consultancy, the fastest signal you can send is to name one of your own errors in front of the team, plainly, with what you learned. Then thank the next person who brings you theirs, especially when it’s inconvenient. People don’t raise problems in a business where raising them costs them. They raise them where it’s been shown to be safe.
The payoff is commercial. Problems surface while they’re small and cheap, rather than at year end or in front of a regulator.
Quick answers
Why do professionals find it hard to admit mistakes? Roles built on precision, like accounting, bookkeeping and engineering, tie a person’s value to being right, so an error can feel like a threat to identity rather than useful information.
Does admitting mistakes build trust? Research by Owens, Johnson and Mitchell (2013, Organization Science) found leaders who express humility, including owning their mistakes and limits, have more engaged and satisfied teams with lower turnover. With clients, raising an error before they find it usually strengthens the relationship.
What did Daniel Kahneman say about being wrong? He told Adam Grant: “No one enjoys being wrong, but I do enjoy having been wrong, because it means I am now less wrong than I was before.” Grant shares it in Think Again (2021).
How do you tell a client you made a mistake? Contact them before they find it, explain what happened and what it means for them, and say what you’re doing to fix it and to stop it happening again.
Ego wants to have been right. Humility gives you the freedom to be less wrong by tomorrow. If you’re working through a lot of change and want someone to think out loud with, I’d love to hear from you.
#GetGroundedWithGrace
