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You Will Stuff It Up at Some Point. And That’s Okay

At some point, you will get it wrong. You will misgender someone. You will miss a disclosure cue. You will respond too quickly. You will minimise something you meant to support. You will freeze in a moment that required courage.

If you lead people for long enough, rupture is inevitable.

The problem in veterinary medicine is not that we make mistakes. The problem is what we have been taught to do after them.

The Hidden Curriculum of Perfection

Veterinary culture prizes competence. Decisiveness. Composure under pressure. Getting it right the first time.

We are trained to stabilise the crashing patient. To manage surgical complications. To make high-stakes decisions quickly and with authority.

But that same training can quietly teach us something else: Mistakes are dangerous, uncertainty is exposure, and correction is threat.

So when relational mistakes happen, we often do what we have been trained to do when our competence feels under scrutiny.

We defend. We minimise. We explain our intention. We move on quickly. And sometimes, silence spreads.

But inclusion does not require flawless leaders. It requires leaders who know how to repair.

A Very Ordinary Rupture

It’s been a difficult morning.

You’re short-staffed. Consults are running late. Two emergencies have arrived at once and everyone is stretched.

One of your vets comes into the office and says quietly: “I’m struggling a bit at the moment. Could we look at whether I can have a little more predictability in my roster for the next few weeks?”

You are already thinking about the three roster gaps you need to fill.

Without really thinking, you reply: “I understand, but I need everyone to be flexible at the moment. If I make exceptions for one person, it becomes difficult to make things fair for everyone.”

They nod. “Yep. No worries.”

The conversation lasts less than two minutes. You go back to the roster. They go back to consults. Nothing dramatic happens. But they do not ask again.

What you don’t know is that it took them several weeks to work up the courage to have that conversation.

You don’t know that “a little more predictability” was the carefully edited version of what they actually needed.

You don’t know that they were dealing with chronic pain and were trying to organise physio appointments. They walked into your office wondering whether it was safe to tell you more.

You certainly did not intend to shut them down. You were under pressure. You were trying to keep the clinic functioning. You thought you were talking about fairness.

But what they may have heard was: Your needs are a problem.

This is the kind of moment inclusion work is made of. Not spectacular acts of discrimination. Not villains. Not people deliberately trying to cause harm. Ordinary people, under pressure, getting something wrong.

And at some point, you will. Everybody does.

The important question is what happens next.

Inclusion Is Relational, Not Procedural

Inclusion is not a policy, a poster, or a one-off training session. It is a set of relationships. And relationships do not remain intact because they are flawless. They remain intact because they can survive rupture.

Repair is the mechanism.

Without repair, people learn something very specific: It is not safe to correct here. It is not safe to give feedback upward. It is not safe to try again. That is how silence becomes adaptive.

A workplace can have excellent policies and still become a place where people quietly stop speaking. That is why repair matters.

What Repair Actually Looks Like

Repair is not dramatic. It is not performative, nor is it self-flagellation. It is steady.

It can sound like:

“I realise I didn’t handle that well.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“I’m sorry. I’d like to do better.”

“Can we reset?”

“I need to think about this properly. I’ll come back to you.”

Or, in the scenario above:

“I’ve been thinking about our conversation yesterday. I responded from the pressure I was feeling about the roster rather than really listening to what you were asking me. I don’t think I handled that well. Can we start again?”

Repair requires something deceptively difficult: The ability to tolerate discomfort without immediately deflecting it.

What repair is not:

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“You’re being too sensitive.”

“I treat everyone the same.”

Silence.

Or an enormous apology that requires the person who was harmed to reassure you that you are actually a good person.

Intent matters. But intent does not erase impact.

Repair acknowledges both.

The Four Parts of Repair

I think useful repair contains four elements.

1. Recognition

Acknowledge that something may not have landed as intended. Do not immediately debate it. Do not litigate every word. Recognise the moment.

“I’ve been thinking about what I said. I don’t think it landed well.”

2. Ownership

Separate intent from impact. “That wasn’t my intention, but I can see how it could have felt dismissive.”

Ownership does not require agreeing with every interpretation of an interaction. It requires recognising your part in it.

3. Curiosity

Try to understand rather than close the conversation down. “If you’re willing, I’d like to understand what that was like from your side.”

Curiosity changes the temperature of a conversation. It tells someone that correction is not automatically dangerous.

4. Adjustment

This is the part that matters most. Demonstrate that the feedback leads somewhere. It might mean changing your language. Clarifying a policy. Changing how meetings are run. Revisiting a roster. Redesigning how adjustment requests are handled. Resetting the tone of a conversation.

Without adjustment, apology becomes theatre.

With adjustment, repair becomes culture.

Why This Is Hard in Veterinary Medicine

Veterinary medicine has a complicated relationship with being wrong. We are trained to stabilise, correct and fix. Our professional identity is deeply entwined with competence.

So when someone tells us that something we said caused harm, it can feel less like information and more like an indictment. Of our judgment. Our authority. Our identity as a good colleague or leader.

That is why people defend. Not always because they are cruel. Often because they are uncomfortable.

Repair requires a different skillset. Emotional regulation. Power awareness. Humility. The capacity to say: I did not get that right.

That is not weakness. That is leadership.

Why Repair Is an Inclusion Skill

Repair is not simply a conflict-management skill that happens to be useful in inclusive workplaces. It is one of the skills that makes inclusion possible.

Inclusion asks people to cross differences in experience, identity, power, communication and need. That means there will be moments when we misunderstand each other.

There will be moments when someone with more power misses something that is obvious to someone with less. There will be language we have not learned yet. Needs we do not immediately understand. Assumptions we did not realise we were carrying.

If every one of those moments becomes a verdict on whether someone is a “good” or “bad” person, people become defensive and the work stops.

But the opposite is also true. If someone repeatedly raises harm and is met with explanation, minimisation or silence, they eventually stop raising it.

Repair holds the space between those two failures.

It allows the person who got something wrong to remain accountable without becoming paralysed by shame. And it allows the person affected to see that speaking up can actually change something.

That is why repair is central to inclusion.

It keeps people in relationship long enough for learning to occur.

Positive Failure

This is where a concept my colleague Jodie Wilson from Disrupt Vet introduced me to becomes useful: positive failure.

In clinical medicine, we already understand the principle. A complication managed early can sharpen clinical judgment. A near miss reviewed openly can improve protocols. A morbidity and mortality discussion can prevent future harm.

The failure is not the endpoint. It is the diagnostic. Inclusion work operates in much the same way.

A comment that lands poorly. A defensive response. A disclosure that is mishandled. A missed opportunity to support someone properly.

These moments are not proof that inclusion is impossible. They are information. They can expose stress points in culture. Reveal hidden norms. Surface unspoken hierarchies. Show where psychological safety becomes thin.

Handled with repair, they become opportunities to strengthen the system. Ignored, minimised or defended, they become silent fractures. And silent fractures accumulate.

The Standard Is Not Perfection

One of the biggest problems in inclusion work is the idea that success means never making a mistake. Say the right thing. Use the right terminology. Know every nuance. Never cause discomfort.

That standard is impossible. And worse, it creates paralysis.

Some leaders become anxious and overcautious. Others disengage completely.

“This is too hard.”

“The rules keep changing.”

“No matter what I say, someone will take issue.”

Both responses are driven by the same thing: Fear of failure.

If the standard is perfection, people retreat. If the standard is responsiveness, people can grow.

You do not need to master every evolving nuance of inclusion. You do need to remain open to correction.

Language will evolve. Norms will shift. Awareness will deepen. You will discover blind spots you did not know you had.

That is not evidence that inclusion has become impossible. It is evidence that our understanding is expanding.

Repair Cannot Stop at the Conversation

Sometimes the repair is interpersonal. “I got that wrong. I’m sorry. What would have helped?”

But sometimes the moment tells you something bigger.

The disclosure that went badly may reveal that nobody in the organisation has ever agreed on how disclosures should be handled.

The adjustment request that became awkward may reveal that managers are making decisions from scratch every time.

The employee who gradually stopped contributing in meetings may reveal that the meetings themselves were never designed for different communication needs.

The recruitment conversation that landed badly may expose assumptions embedded much earlier in the hiring process.

That is where repair becomes more than an interpersonal skill. It becomes organisational learning.

A good repair asks two questions. What does this person need from me now?

And: What does this moment tell us we need to change so that the same thing is less likely to happen again?

That second question is where inclusion moves from good intentions into infrastructure.

Because if the same system keeps producing the same rupture, it has not really been repaired.

Repair as Infrastructure

This is also why I built the Vetquity toolkit ecosystem. The toolkits are not designed to make leaders perfect. They are designed to reduce the amount of inclusion work that has to be improvised in the moment.

They give teams something practical to work with when the system starts telling them that something is not working.

Access Check helps identify environmental and procedural barriers that people may otherwise have to repeatedly push against.

Safe to Share helps create the conditions in which disclosure and conversations about support can happen before someone reaches crisis point.

Open Doors looks at the signals embedded in recruitment and entry into the workplace.

Ask Better, Count Everyone helps organisations ask better questions and understand who may be missing from their data.

The Signals You Send examines the everyday messages contained in policies and systems that tell people whether difference is genuinely welcome.

And Moments That Matter helps translate inclusion from principle into ordinary workplace behaviour.

The aim is not to eliminate every mistake. You cannot. The aim is to stop every difficult moment from depending on whether one stressed manager happens to improvise exactly the right response.

That is what infrastructure does.

The Culture You Create

When leaders model repair, teams learn something powerful. Mistakes are survivable. Feedback is usable. Correction does not automatically lead to punishment. Power can self-correct.

That is psychological safety in action.

And it creates a very different workplace from one in which people learn that raising a concern is more dangerous than remaining silent.

You will still get things wrong. Every organisation will.

The good ones learn.

And when that learning becomes embedded in the way you recruit, communicate, respond to disclosure, make adjustments, collect information and design everyday work, repair stops being something exceptional leaders happen to be good at.

It becomes part of the infrastructure of the organisation.