The only thing worse than making a mistake is keeping it bottled up inside. Learning from the mistakes of others could help you embark on the healing journey of sharing and working through a mistake of your own, with someone you trust.
To successfully repair after a mistake, you need to acknowledge and name the mistake, validate the other person's feelings and viewpoint, and create a plan for the specific actions you will take to prevent this mistake from occurring again.
I see this daily in veterinary medicine, where high burnout rates cost the sector upwards of $2 billion per year. It's a challenging environment with long hours, stressful workloads and patients that can't even tell you what's wrong. But I've found that the best way to boost performance and even increase capacity with maxed-out teams is to address the underlying operational issues.
Effective 1:1s with a direct manager work best when treated as a recurring, IC‑owned ritual: you drive the agenda, balance business updates with development, and always walk away with clear next steps and expectations. The playbook below uses my notes to create a repeatable system anyone can use during 1:1 direct report meetings to build trust, get support, and progress career.
