I recently subscribed to “Work Chronicles”, an online comic with a work related theme. Basically all of the daily comics are hilariously on point and relatable, and the one from two weeks ago especially so.
The topic of the comic was failure in the work place, and it was sad-funny, or rather, much more sad than funny. The comic strip shows a dialogue between a (middle) manager having a dialogue with his team, saying he encouraged failure. When the team asks if they get fired if they fail, the manager says “Yes”. And adds again that the organization does encourage taking risks and failing.
This is quite classical, reinforced by work related social media platforms such as LinkedIn and news articles. I mean, how often do you see a post of someone admitting failure and how their organization learned from it? Please do send me a link of such a post, I have never seen one. Rare are the article posts about someone admitting true failure (I do not count the individuals detailing small missteps, that eventually led to riches and fame). But then again most organizations will state that they encourage “thinking outside the box” and want their employees to be honest about failures and not punishing said employees if such issues come up.
What does it mean, to allow for failure and how does it affect the bottom line? If you are a senior C-suit personnel, can you honestly say that your closest managers would let you know, truthfully, if a big (+10 MEUR) project is a failing? Would they tell you of large inefficiencies needing a large part of their organization to be slashed, possibly even their role? What processes do you have in place to make sure those below the closest managers in the chain of command would feel comfortable in reaching out and detailing issues that might or are affecting the bottom line?
Working with this topic is what I mean by “allowing failure as an asset”; make sure you have processes in place to make sure people will step forward when they identify major issues, instead of disvoering them when it is too late.
How do you get started then, how can you change things in your organization, practically speaking?
- Admit your own failures as a manager, what you learned from your professional failure and what you are doing to mitigate the failure from happening again
- Make and explain the distinction between failures that will lead to losing ones job (e.g. fraud) vs. acceptable failure
- Book stand-ups or similar sessions where you discuss winnings as well as failures, and how the team can help in fixing and mitigating these
As always, drop me a line if you want to chat more in-depth about this topic.
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