Something terrible has happened. A supplied fell through or maybe you just screwed something up. Either way, you need to tell your boss and deal with the consequences.
Most people do not like discussing their failures or the failures of others even if they know their boss will be OK with it. Our first impulse is to come up with an excuse to divert the blame. This is not the best course of action, even if it’s really not your fault. It focuses on the past and forces your boss to come up with a solution to yet another problem.
Rather than volunteering an excuse spend a few seconds analyzing the situation and devise some options for next steps that mitigate the damage. When you deliver the bad news propose these options for next steps. This accomplishes two things: It quickly focuses on the future, and is an opportunity to communicate relevant information that may be of use to your boss thereby making their decision easier.
For example, once upon a time I was working at a silicon company. Part of my job was to investigate a yield problem on a specific microchip. This involved loading a wafer of exposed microchips into a microscope, pulling a level to drive some probes into one chip on the wafer, and running some software on a special computer.
This went great for weeks. I had made some discoveries that helped us isolate the root cause of our problem. Then I screwed up. I needed to switch from one chip to another but I forgot to raise the lever before sliding the wafer! With the probes still lowered I damaged the delicate exposed microchips and more importantly I destroyed the probes.
Due to the importance of the yield problem it was imperative that my team recover from this set back quickly. There were still enough chips on the wafer to continue experimentation, but we had no back set of probes. The options were obvious immediately: We halt this line of research while the probes were repaired and continue our investigation using completely different methods, or we could attempt to rewrite our testing programs for a different testing computer which had a working set of probes, which would take about a week of effort.
I reported my screw up along with my proposal for next steps. My boss agreed that we would halt this line of research, while the probes were repaired, and switch to a completely different approach at solving the problem. In the end we after much gradual research we isolated the root cause and the yield crisis was resolved. My damage to the probes did not end up causing a delay.
Only weeks later everyone remembered that I had proposed a different direction in the research and no one seemed to care about the unfortunate circumstances that led me to make the proposal.
