If Everything’s Going Right, You’re Doing Something Wrong

In a recent meeting with a HotelTonight exec, she listed all the things that were going well on her team.

I asked what wasn’t going well.

I sensed hesitation, so I assured her it wasn’t a trick question. Because if everything’s going perfectly, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough and taking responsible risks.

I’ve written before about the virtue of getting outside of your comfort zone. Naturally, there will be failures and bumps along the way. The key is that when things go wrong, you learn from them. This is important for individuals, teams and companies.

An example: We set four key initiatives at HotelTonight for the second half of 2017. One didn’t work as planned. While the team performed exceptionally well, we learned that a metric we felt was correlated to revenue was not. We have since sunsetted this metric, and refocused on other goals and tactics for achieving our revenue targets. (It’s worth noting that the team did brilliantly on the other three initiatives!)

To clarify, this concept shouldn’t be interpreted as a license to intentionally fail or do less than your very best. Setting high goals and striving for excellence is vital to success. And, of course, you shouldn’t risk everything at once – you want to take acceptable levels of risk that are self-contained. But if you pick a variety of goals and set the bar high, you can’t and won’t achieve everything. That means you’re reaching high enough.

I’d love to hear from you: What’s going wrong? And what are you learning that will improve the way you operate this year?