At the time, my company provided digital prepress services to professional portrait photographers. One particular customer was unhappy because we hadn’t done some pretty extensive custom work that had neither been ordered nor paid for.

Because I had empowered my employees to make decisions and meet customer expectations, when my employee agreed to do the additional work to make the customer happy, I had no recourse but to bite the bullet and pay for the work. I backed my employee up 100 percent.

Employees sometimes do things we might not have done had we been on the other end of the phone or standing in front of the customer. Mistakes are “teaching moments,” but they also can be expensive. Too many mistakes, and you’ll likely “teach” your employees while going out of business.

Nevertheless, mistakes also are part of life. Over the course of my career, I’ve learned a thing or two about mistakes. Some from watching others make them, some from watching how leaders deal with them, and many times from mistakes I’ve made myself. Here are the highlights of what I’ve learned:

There’s nothing you can do about it // No matter how hard you try, how well you train and how dedicated you are to being mistake-free, mistakes happen. Sometimes it’s because people aren’t paying attention, but often it’s because people are trying to step up and perform at a higher level—many times outside of their current skill set. If people aren’t making those mistakes, maybe you have a bigger problem.

Did you know that Post-it Notes were a mistake? Imagine what our desks would look like without that mistake. Dr. Spencer Silver was actually trying to make a super-strong adhesive for 3M, but instead discovered a “low-tack,” reusable, pressure-sensitive adhesive that was originally characterized as a solution without a problem. Mistakes not only happen, sometimes you might even want them to happen.

People learn from mistakes // At least, great employees learn from their mistakes. What’s more, they own them, fix them and try to put measures in place so the same mistake doesn’t happen again. Problems arise when the same employee makes the same mistake over and over again without making any effort to fix the error.

Once we had solved the above-mentioned problem with our unhappy customer, we spent some time talking about other ways to deal with similar situations that could arise in the future. Ultimately, we discovered there was a communication problem between the photographer, their customer and what was shared with us. We came up with a plan to try to nip a potential problem in the bud, before it had an opportunity to become a bigger problem.

Beating up on an employee who has made a mistake is a waste of breath // Most people aren’t looking for opportunities to make mistakes. In fact, once they realize they’ve made a mistake, they are likely harder on themselves than you are. Better to spend the time helping identify what to do next time and to avoid a mistake in the future. I’ve always appreciated the boss who didn’t focus on how stupid the mistake may have been or what a bonehead I was to have made it.

Sometimes working together to figure out the problem can be incredibly helpful and can bring to light the reason why the mistake happened in the first place.

Of course, there are times when an employee just doesn’t seem to care about mistakes and carelessly goes from mistake to mistake. In those cases, you might need to find another employee. But those instances tend to be few and far between.

Many small businesses try to run on paper-thin margins these days, so making mistakes can be very costly. Maybe a more realistic approach is to look at margins over mistakes, since we all make them—even the boss.