We have all experienced failure, both personally and professionally. I believe it’s important not to bemoan the failure – you want to do something about it. That is especially true for companies.
Whether the mishap comes from a product launch gone wrong or whether your system is hacked right before an investor meeting, your business is not the first to experience a systems meltdown. What matters is what you do next.
Is your attitude constructive, collaborative, and humble? Your team’s challenge is to find out what went wrong in order to learn from it and prevent it from happening again.
Harvard Business Review expert Amy C. Edmondson says, “The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible. Yet organizations that do it well are rare.”
Edmondson studied managers in many industries who wanted to help their organizations learn from failure. She discovered that most managers believed that failure was “bad” and assigned reports to their staff to find out what went wrong.
Oftentimes, she found, the “blame game” gets in the way. That is human nature: we often find that when something goes wrong, we try to find a scapegoat to blame.
Yet this is going about it in the wrong way. Edmondson instead supports “a culture that makes it safe to admit and report on failure can –and in some organizational contexts must – coexist with high standards for performance.”
This is the philosophy I embrace for Softonic: I want us to have a learning culture that makes people feel comfortable with – and responsible for – learning from failures.
Taking Responsibility
When I am working with my team, if I slip up, I make a point to own up to it quickly. Why? I remember a high school coach telling me, “You learn more from losing than from winning.”
If I did something wrong, I want to analyze it. I want to learn from it. I want to ask my colleagues how they might solve a problem more effectively than I did.
When you own up to making a mistake, you clear the air so that others feel free to take ownership for their own missteps. This is a constructive way to proceed.
Business is a team sport. No one employee is solely responsible for a failure.
Look upon failure as an opportunity
You may recall Thomas Edison’s phrase, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” So he kept trying.
Failure can inspire your team to take greater risks, which in turn will lead to imagination, creativity and innovation. You want your team to practice perseverance, don’t you? If you approach failure from this new perspective, it can serve to further motivate the people with whom you work.
I want Softonic to be a culture that is gentle with failure; one that recognizes that in a true learning environment we can be open and receptive to the lessons we may learn from our mistakes.
I want ours to be a culture that fully embraces our mistakes, that takes ownership of them as a team. We can look into our rear view mirror at the place we traveled from and look ahead, moving forward with confidence.
Failure is a means not an end when it inspires everyone to achieve their full potential; when it motivates the team to be the best they can be.