Is it bad to show your boss vulnerability?

Asked by chelle21689 (7907) January 24th, 2017 from iPhone

Hi, been a while since I posted about work. For several months I’ve been doing good at this job and improved greatly since I started February 2016.

I was on a roll until this past month I made mistakes. One was careless error because I underpaid an invoice and put the wrong amount. The other was because I didn’t know any better. I made the first mistake because we were all rushing to get things in by a deadline before we closed for two weeks during holiday and it was given to me late.
The other was because I thought I knew all about faculty positions but I didn’t. I was fairly new handling it since my trainer is on maternity leave. I basically hired Jane Doe into John Smith’s position to replace him as a term faculty. Turns out just because Jane is replacing John doesn’t mean she’s full time. You see there’s term faculty for three quarter time and full time for the exact position.

No one ever explained that to me. I thought it was just one kind of term. So it messed up their pay. I know now to look at paperwork requested long ago where to look. Also, I know the difference now. A VP verbally told us to do so without the usual paperwork which led be to make mistakes more since I wasn’t as familiar as I thought.

Anyway, I talked to my boss about the mistakes. She basically said its a learning experience and they’re all odd positions that are exceptions to the rule. I still couldn’t help but feel like a lost dummy again like I did when I first started. I basically revealed to her that it made me question myself whether I was good enough. She told me she never thought of me as a bad employee or firable. I really needed to hear this to see.

Anyway, talking helped me feel a lot better to see her view. That I was not incompetent. People told me that I should’ve never showed my lack of self esteem and discouraged spirit because it will cost in an advancement possibly.