> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.leadingwithempathy.blog/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # How to Handle Developer Mistakes Without Blame or Shame - URL: https://www.leadingwithempathy.blog/mistakes-happen-heres-how-i-help-my-team-grow-from-them/ - Published: 2025-06-24T07:52:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-23T11:50:20.000Z - Description: I no longer remember exactly what broke. I remember the person who stayed online late trying to make up for it, and the moment they realised exhaustion was not accountability. - Author: Megan Tipps - Tags: EngineeringLeadership, Software Development, Developer Teams, Mistakes at Work, EmpatheticLeadership, Accountability, Psychological Safety, Team Culture, Production Incidents, Continuous Improvement, Human-First Leadership, Sustainable Leadership I cannot remember exactly what the mistake was. It may have been an untested version accidentally released into production. I think some things broke for customers, but it happened long enough ago that the technical details have blurred. Whatever went wrong was serious enough to need fixing, but it was not the part that stayed with me. What I remember is someone on my team staying online late. They were trying to make up for what had happened. The mistake had already been made, but they seemed determined to repay it with hours, as though continuing to work long after they were tired might somehow balance the scales. The next day, they were visibly more exhausted. I asked them a simple question: would it genuinely make a difference if everything was finished by midnight, or by the following afternoon? They paused. Once we removed the panic from the situation, the answer was obvious. There was no meaningful difference. Working deep into the night would not undo the original mistake. It would only mean approaching the next part of the problem with a tired brain and a greater chance of getting something else wrong. They decided to stop and get a proper night’s sleep. Years later, that is what I remember. Not the feature, the deployment or precisely what broke. I remember the moment when urgency loosened its grip enough for someone to see that exhausting themselves was not a form of accountability. When I first became a team lead, I did not know how to create that kind of pause. I had never taken a leadership course, and I had not received the structured guidance I probably needed. Most of what I learned came from doing the job, getting things wrong and trying to do better the next time. In the beginning, almost every mistake felt like an emergency I was somehow expected to know how to handle. At first, I would freeze. Under pressure, my mind would become a collection of unanswered questions. What had happened? What was I supposed to do? Who needed to know? Was this now my fault too? As I became more confident, freezing sometimes turned into rescue mode. If someone on my team made a mistake, particularly someone I knew was trying hard, my instinct was to jump in and fix everything. I wanted to protect the person, calm the situation and make the problem disappear as quickly as possible. It felt supportive. Sometimes it was useful. But taking over also carried a quieter risk. If I absorbed every difficult consequence, the person who had made the mistake lost part of the opportunity to understand it. They might leave the situation feeling relieved, but not necessarily better equipped for the next one. I could remove the discomfort so efficiently that I also removed the learning. I gradually began to understand that helping someone recover is different from rescuing them. Recovery starts with slowing the situation down enough to see it clearly. That can be difficult when customers are affected or production is misbehaving. There may be immediate work that needs to happen, and sometimes everyone has to move quickly. Even then, panic is rarely as useful as it feels. A stressed response from a leader adds another problem to the original one. People become more concerned with managing the leader’s reaction than explaining what happened. Details get missed. Someone who might have asked for help sooner begins wondering whether staying quiet would be safer. I still have to practise pausing. It has never become an automatic state of calm in which I float serenely above every production incident. I gather the information, speak to the people involved and try not to decide what the mistake means before I understand what actually happened. Sometimes the most important part of that conversation happens privately. A person may already be replaying the mistake in their head, criticising themselves more harshly than anyone else could. They do not need me to add shame to the situation. They need enough steadiness to help them separate what they did from who they are. That does not mean pretending the mistake had no impact. If customers were affected, we need to acknowledge that. If our process allowed an unsafe release, we need to understand why. If someone skipped an important step, we need to talk honestly about it. Empathy is not a polite way of avoiding accountability. After the incident I remember, we became more cautious and added further guardrails to the deployment process. The response was not simply to tell everyone to “be more careful.” We changed the environment around the work so that one tired, distracted or overloaded person was less likely to cause the same problem again. That matters because mistakes rarely belong only to the final person who touched the button. There are usually surrounding questions worth asking. Was the process clear? Was testing sufficient? Did someone feel rushed? Could another check have caught the problem? Had we made it easy to ask for help before the release? Guardrails do not remove personal responsibility. They make the lesson useful beyond one person. There is still a line between a mistake and a pattern. If someone keeps making the same mistake without learning from it, firmer accountability becomes necessary. Patience cannot mean having the same conversation forever while nothing changes. For me, willingness to learn is what separates the two. A mistake can be painful and disruptive, but if the person is honest, engages with what happened and changes how they work, there is somewhere to go. When the same behaviour repeats without reflection or adjustment, the problem is no longer only the original error. It is the refusal to learn from it. Leaders have to be willing to face that too. I learned leadership by doing it badly at times, reflecting and trying again. I cannot ask my team to treat mistakes as information while treating my own as evidence that I should already have known better. Perhaps that is why the technical detail of this particular incident matters less to me now. The broken thing was repaired. The deployment process became safer. The person slept. What remained was a clearer understanding that growth does not come from making someone suffer enough for their mistake. It comes from helping them face it with enough honesty, rest and support to do something differently next time. [ ![Buy Me A Coffee](https://cdn.buymeacoffee.com/buttons/v2/default-yellow.png) ](https://buymeacoffee.com/leadingwithempathy?ref=leadingwithempathy.blog)