Everyone knows that we learn from our mistakes and that they are a necessary part of our development process.
However, how many companies have you worked for where they tolerated mistakes?
More often than not people are punished for their mistakes, which means the only things we learn is that, mistakes are dangerous and we should keep them to a minimum.
When people talk about learning from mistakes, I don’t believe that this is what we had in mind.
Mistakes can be costly and we should look to try and keep them to a minimum, we shouldn’t encourage mistakes just for the sake of learning.
However, we should be more tolerant of mistakes, and we should work with our teams to minimize the impact of mistakes and maximize the learning.
If we look to punish mistakes we will create a culture where risks are avoided, as risk taking often increases the probability of mistakes and failure.
But if we eliminate risks then we really will be settling for mediocrity, as small risks lead to small gains.
There is a saying; “you have to go out on a limb sometimes, as that is where the fruit is”.
In order for our organizations to reach their full potential, we need to take risks, sometimes big risks and this means that we will increase our probability of mistakes and failure, but we should embrace this and see it as progress.
As leaders, we set the culture, we need to be the ones who encourage risk taking in a safe environment, encouraging sensible risk taking.
If we focus on punishing mistakes, then we are stopping progress!
Gordon, great comments. I recall Frank Borman telling me once that a good manager makes 50% of his/her decisions correctly. He also said if the manager says he/she makes 75% right, then he/she is a liar. His point to me as a young manager working for him was not to fear making mistakes in our decisions but to learn from the bad ones and keep taking control and making decisions when needed. Those who fear mistakes enough tend to fail to make decisions that are needed, and that in and of itself is a mistake as well. I enjoyed your comments.
Doug
Doug, it’s a dilemma you have the choice of “failing through wrong action or failing from in-action”, but for me and most good leaders this isn’t really a choice as in-action never leads to success.
At a foreign exchange trading centre at the Middle East a boss kept on telling his traders, No Mistakes’ and ofcourse they made no profits too. But then a boss came and said. “Make as many mistakes as you want, but at the end of the day, I wan profits.” he made the dealing department one of the most profitable in area.
Herbert thanks for the comment, i fully support this view.
I have a slightly different story, but similar theme on rugby. A few years back NZ had a team that were playing the best rugby of any nation. They had found a way to reduce the number of errors to a ridiculously low level, which made them practically unbeatable. What was there approach – perfect practice they drilled and drilled in ordered to eliminate mistakes.
Other teams saw this error free rugby and tried to copy it, but they didn’t understand how it had been achieved. One country, who will remain nameless, found a different way to reduce errors, and that was by reducing risks. They played very safe rugby.
The only problem was that they made few errors but also created very few chances and consequently they didn’t achieve their primary goal of winning more games.
IT also made them very dull to watch.
Permalink