Cutting-edge research shows that the way employees are trained to think about mistakes can make or break motivation, resilience, and productivity. Here’s what every executive should know.
The Value of Errors
Errors aren’t just inevitable—they’re essential. But in most organizations, mistakes are treated as liabilities rather than assets. This approach is costing you. A 2025 study published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology offers compelling evidence: how you train and mentor employees to handle mistakes directly affects their engagement, learning, and sustained effort.
In short, your culture around errors is either developing high-performing, resilient talent—or undermining it.
The Research That Changes the Game
In two controlled experiments, researchers Tulis and Dresel tested how beliefs and feedback about mistakes influenced learning behavior. While their participants were students, the findings map directly onto workplace environments where complex problem-solving, learning curves, and innovation are part of the job.
Key insights for employers:
- Beliefs about mistakes drive behavior. Participants who were encouraged to view errors as a valuable part of the learning process demonstrated more persistence, greater effort, and more strategic thinking than those told mistakes were harmful.
- Negative messaging has lasting harm. A single training emphasizing error-prevention led to a measurable drop in motivation, metacognitive engagement, and persistence—even though the session was only 50 minutes long.
- Immediate feedback works. When participants received just-in-time prompts encouraging reflection and emotional regulation after making an error, they were significantly more likely to stick with the task and adjust their approach effectively.
Why This Matters to Executives
1. Performance Isn’t the Same as Learning—And That’s a Problem
Too often, organizations focus only on short-term performance metrics. But the study showed that adaptive responses to mistakes didn’t immediately improve test scores—they improved behaviors that drive long-term capability: reflection, resilience, and the willingness to re-engage. These traits are what build adaptable, high-performing teams.
2. Your Training May Be Undermining Employee Potential
In one experiment, trainees who were given “tips” warning about the dangers of errors showed significantly worse outcomes across all measures—less persistence, weaker strategic thinking, and a higher tendency to give up. If your onboarding or compliance programs emphasize avoiding mistakes without balancing that with growth messaging, you may be capping your employees’ capacity.
3. Simple Changes in Framing Can Drive Better Outcomes
Participants who received subtle, supportive prompts like “It’s okay to make mistakes—it means you’re stretching your skills” or “What can you learn from this misstep?” responded more constructively. These aren’t expensive interventions—they’re leadership cues and cultural norms.
4. Innovation Depends on How You Handle Failure
You can’t have innovation without risk. And you can’t have risk without the possibility of failure. The most forward-thinking companies foster “psychological safety”—a climate in which people are not punished or judged for making mistakes. This research gives you the blueprint for how to train and mentor with that goal in mind.
A Call to Action for Leadership
This isn’t a soft-skills issue. It’s a core strategy issue. Talent retention, innovation, and performance depend on how your organization handles failure. If you’re serious about equipping your workforce for complex problem-solving, future leadership, and sustainable growth, you need to rethink how you structure your learning culture.
Start here:
- Audit your training materials and management communication for messaging that might stigmatize errors.
- Coach managers to use reflective prompts when providing feedback after a misstep.
- Normalize mistakes in team discussions and post-mortems by focusing on learning outcomes.
- Reframe performance conversations to include not just outcomes but how employees respond to challenges and setbacks.
Final Word
Organizations that build a culture of adaptive error response don’t just create better learners—they create better leaders. Start treating mistakes as data points for growth, not indicators of failure. Your most engaged, capable, and resilient workforce depends on it.
Reference (APA):
Tulis, M., & Dresel, M. (2025). Effects on and consequences of responses to errors: Results from two experimental studies. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 95(1), 143–161. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjep.12686
Written by Lisa J Meier