Here's how you can support employees in bouncing back from failure.

En todo ámbito laboral los riesgos son latentes ante los constantes retos y desafíos, por lo que será importante fomentar en los empleados esa actitud determinante y persistente para no desistir en las intensiones de logro. Ir más allá de los sentimientos desalentadores que se desaten por las aspiraciones frustradas; es decir, no desistir en el intento, aceptar la derrota pero no rendirse hasta lograr el propósito planteado. Es más, la cultura organizacional debe considerar al fracaso como un indicador de cambio sobre las acciones emprendidas que no funcionan, replanteándose nuevas perspectivas más apegadas a la realidad, sin perder de vista el éxito.

How employees bounce back depends a lot on the culture of the organisation. It has limited effect telling them that it is OK and not to worry, if they feel that they have lost the respect or friendship of others or that they might be at risk of workplace bullying or isolation due to it. So start by looking up in the organisation, how do the Leadership team deal with frustration and things going wrong? We all know in theory that success comes off the back of failure somewhere along the line but is there an openness to reflection, change, innovation and self development in your organisation. If not are there some changes that can be made to start to change that, even just small changes?

We are hard-wired to learn best from our mistakes. When you obsess about something that happened, it's almost always a mistake. You don't usually obsess about your success. From an evolutionary perspective, predators removed those who didn't learn from their mistakes from the gene pool. As a result, we learned to pay attention to and learn from our mistakes. We can take that wiring and reframe our thinking around it, and instead of seeing a mistake as a threat, we can rewire our brain to see the mistake as a way to learn and grow. It's critical that thinking is embodied by the team leaders and managers.

When a team member makes a mistake it's important to approach their mistake from a point of neutrality as much as possible. A mistake is neither good or bad, it's what's so. Acknowledge that and help the team member move forward with support, encouragement, and guidance tailored to promote personal growth and resilience.

Reflection is essential for positive change, personal growth and professional development. Can you bring reflection into your meetings? This could be as simple as asking everyone to share something that they could have done differently or a different choice they could have made and (if they are willing) to also share what have thought about it since then. It may be that you will find they are being unnecessarily critical of themselves and the team can support them to let the issue go and move on OR you might find that others in the team really benefit from hearing their thinking on something and can move forward themselves following that. I would suggest that this is something that needs to be gradually and carefully introduced.

As a Supervisor I make a real effort to note down challenges and 'failures' that someone talks about. I am then able to ask how they feel about these the following session and carefully raise them again when they are ready to look at them without the level of emotional investment that they would have had initially. It I need to talk to one of my teenagers about something that has really irritated me, then I know it is always best done later or even the following day because we all benefit from having a little emotional distance from the issue. How can you help them find the emotional distance? Encourage them to focus on a different project for a day, ask them to support a colleague with something they are skilled at or just go for a walk

Promote a Growth Mindset Encourage your team to adopt a growth mindset, where abilities and intelligence are seen as developable through effort and perseverance. Reinforce the idea that setbacks are a natural part of the growth process and that persistence and effort can lead to improvement and success.