To achieve success in life or business you will at times have to deal with failure as well!
We have all heard the cliches about success and failure that go something like these:
- If at first you don’t succeed try try again (Thomas Palmer),
- I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying (Michael Jordan),
- Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure… than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat (Theodore Roosevelt).
But what about the manager of a company or group who tries to show the people he leads that making the attempt to achieve something that may have a less than average probability of success is okay?
Words alone will most likely do the trick, but leading by example has a much greater chance of getting through.
Remember this commercial from Domino’s that extolls the virtues of taking reasonable risk with failure an acceptable outcome?
From The Manager’s Diary this is the author’s lesson called, ‘How to Show Your Team that Failure is OK‘!
We talk a lot about failure in this blog: The inevitability of failure when striving for something new, how to get past it on your way to success, how it doesn’t actually mean anything unless you learn from it. But how do you promote failure as a Leader? It’s one thing to say that it is OK, and it is another to back that up with action, but how does one encourage and advertise “constructive failure?”
Advertise YOUR OWN path to failure
I don’t mean talking about how you failed, learned, and eventually succeeded in the past. Everybody does that when they are setting an atmosphere where failure is OK. I’m talking about letting your team actually watch you try something with a low probability of success, but that would undoubtedly be a positive for the organization. That way they see the whole process from start to finish. Too often we look at the end result of failure (and say it is OK as long as long we learned from it), but what is most powerful is what is learned THROUGH the challenge.
So the next time you have a “stretch” goal, or are looking to try something a little crazy, make sure your team knows about it, update them regularly, and make sure to let them know what you learned. After you do this a few times, you will find that everyone on your team is experimenting and innovating with a little something. Show them how to start a “failure” and you’ll see more of them try, and as the law of averages dictates, more of them succeed as opposed to fail. (Source)