How do you treat Failure?

🔴 Failures are not Allowed 🔴
But how can you learn from your failures and mistakes if it’s not allowed to make them?

In many organizations, a zero-tolerance to mistakes is exemplified. Learning from failures can help your employees grow both professionally and personally. In complex and dynamic environments learning and adaptability are key for success.

What to do instead and how to establish #agile failure culture

1. Stay Realistic And Accept Failure: Admit that mistakes and failures happen and are unavoidable, they are part of human nature. And if you fight against reality, it’s a fight you will lose but only 100% of the time.

And it will massively impact your business. If you do not allow mistakes, people will still make them but will be much less open about it. This destroys learning and growth opportunities and is a huge waste for your organization.

2. Create Awareness: by owning your mistakes and admitting them. Share what you’ve learned and how you want to avoid this mistake in the future.

3. Check Your Communication: When you talk about mistakes focus on positive and appreciative communication. If it sounds impossible to you, start with neutral. Stay constructive and optimistic!

4. Stay Away From Sanctions: your team has to know that mistakes are normal and there will be no punishment for making and admitting mistakes. Take this promis seriously! Make it your official policy.

5. Extract Learnings. Ask: What can we learn from this? How can we create something great out of this experience? Mistakes, If seen as opportunities for creation, learning, and growth, can be extremely valuable. Amplify useful change after extracting the learnings!


These steps can be your stepping stones toward a learning organization. And the better your business is at learning, the more successful it will become.

BONUS:
Assume that, regardless of what you discover, everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand (1). Use this as your base assumption. For it to really work and serve you, you have to let it sink in and truly believe that.

Chances are high that this assumption is very realistic and will serve you and your organization. Everyone is doing their best. And if you are not satisfied with the outcomes and want to do something about it, if you want to blame someone - look in the mirror. And ask how you can be the change you want to see in others.


Is your organization struggling with adopting a modern failure culture? Lets talk

➡️ My name is Alexander Lossew
➡️ I coach executives, leaders, and teams and support them in getting from good to great.

(1) This assumption is based on the Prime Directive by Norm Kerth.
Foto by the Andrii Leonov - unsplash