Do employees at successful companies like Pixar, fess up when they make mistakes?

I’m pretty sure that just because someone works at Pixar, that doesn’t make them a model employee. Every company is going to have good employees, bad employees, lazy employees who manage to slip under the radar.

Mistakes will be made; it’s inevitable. It depends on the company’s cultural environment as to how mistakes are handled, whether as unforgivable blots or as a way of learning what doesn’t work and then moving on until they figure out what does. I imagine Pixar is of the latter camp. Heck, they put their bloopers on the DVDs as bonus features! Disney, though, was a perfectionist, which filtered into their corporate culture, and I think that’s a major reason why the combo of Disney and Pixar didn’t work too well.

I’m not sure about Pixar. I do have experience in real life though. I’ve always had the attitude that if I make a mistake I own up to it and fix it. Sometimes coworkers get on my last nerve when they try to hide or ignore their mistakes especially when I end up having to clean up their mess. Even moreso when a coworker takes advantage of the fact that I admit my mistakes by making me “look bad” for it. I got used to that possibility and learned ways to circumvent it but still rather frustrating.

Only if they get caught.

I would guess that part of the culture at a highly successful company is allowing people to own up to mistakes and rectify them if possible. You can’t encourage initiative and creativity without allowing for some mistakes.

At my husband’s company, anybody who tries to cover up a mistake rather than fix it is let go.

I’ve never worked there.

In corporate America the issue is not so much as whether you made the mistake, but rather, as @yarnlady points out, what your response to the mistake is.

There are mistakes and then there are dumb mistakes and then there are stupid mistakes. My background is accounting, numerical errors and even errors in spreadsheet logic can be caught if one checks one’s work and checks it a second time.

Errors in judgment can be small or be real whoppers. Look at “New Coke” for those of us old enough to remember that debacle. In Business school we were taught that you have to take risks and that entails making mistakes, large and small.

It is only when you do a lousy job of covering mistakes that you can get into real trouble.