Employee gets accidentally added to email thread where everyone talks about them, they confront boss about it, who immediately apologizes: ‘I felt pretty awkward all day’

When someone else makes a mistake at work, do you let them know or do you stay out of it?

It seems like there is no wrong or right answer here, and every person makes a judgment call when they find themselves in that situation. It really all depends on the type of mistake that was made, the person who made it, and whether or not it even concerns you.

If the person who made the mistake is, say, your boss, who's notoriously bad at receiving any type of feedback, most people would prefer staying out of it and letting the boss figure it out on their own. But if the mistake was made by a coworker you genuinely care about and can help, maybe you will prefer letting them know about it and finding a way to fix it together.

The mistake that was made in the story below is a tough one, and the employee who discovered it truly didn't know which course of action they should take, mainly because they didn't want everyone to know that they were even slightly involved in the mix-up.

It all started when this employee asked their boss to take a step back from a complicated project. The boss agreed, but forgot to take the employee out of the email thread that discussed the project with the rest of the team. This led the employee to receive emails where the team discussed the project and the employee's decision to remove themselves from it, stuff that they definitely were not meant for the employee's eyes.

Here is where we come back to the first question - should the employee tell their boss that they are still on the thread, or should they stay quiet and see how it plays out? If someone finds out they were reading all these emails, it could get awkward, but the thought of confronting their boss about it makes the employee even more nervous.

Eventually, the employee chose one of these options, and the result turned out to be not as bad as they expected. Read the rest of the story below.