No matter where you stand in the company hierarchy, no matter how well you’ve done your due diligence, and no matter how careful you are before committing yourself to a course of action, sometimes you’re going to crash and burn. Bad decisions are inevitable, and they’re rarely obvious except in retrospect. I’ve taken speaking engagements that, looking back, I shouldn’t have agreed to accept. It was a bad decision, and I wish I hadn’t done it. But I learned a lot through the process.

Sure, you can minimize the occurrence and impact of mistakes, but short of hiding in your office and refusing to make any decisions at all, you’ll never be able to avoid them. Your leaders expect you to make decisions, often in the face of calculated risk—and there’s always, always an error rate. You make the best decision you can at the time with the information available to you.

Instead of worrying about that error rate, keep reminding yourself that your bad decisions aren’t likely to kill your career or ruin the company. When Western Union turned down a certain Mr. Bell’s telephone in the 1880s because they considered it an electrical toy, that was a terrible decision—but Western Union still exists. When Yahoo! executives brushed off a funding request from Sergey Brin and Larry Page, leading to the independent founding of the ridiculously profitable Google.com, that was another terrible decision…but Yahoo! is still alive and well.

Sometimes decisions go bad when something fails through no fault of your own. Recently, a friend of a friend sold a screenplay to a production company that was gung-ho about the project…until the founder unexpectedly passed away. Now the movie won’t be made. In some circumstances, it may simply be that of the thousands of possible decisions you can make on a particular issue, only a few can ever turn out to be good ones. Even so, if you learn from your failures, you’ll know—as Edison noted after over a thousand failed attempts to perfect the light bulb—what doesn’t work.

Remounting

When a bad decision becomes obvious, you have two basic choices: either you can give up, in which case everyone involved loses, or you can get back on the horse and try again. The recovery process can be painful, especially when your bad decision has affected others people’s lives—and the higher you’ve climbed the workplace ladder, the more people you’ll hurt. So here’s what you do when things go wrong:

1. Accept responsibility. Forget the blame game. Mature professionals not only accept personal responsibility when things go wrong because they screwed up, they do so willingly, even eagerly. Even when you’re a team lead and you feel your people have let you down, the responsibility remains yours; they’re your team, after all.