How to turn failure into success

Creating success from failure: The mistake of perfection

In business and in life, things sometimes go wrong. This is something that we as humans must accept. If we don’t, we’ll never make decisions in a timely manner; instead, we’ll spend most of our time thinking about what might go wrong.

Especially in a business environment, we will never be 100% certain about anything. This means we must make decisions based on our best assessment of any situation. This isn’t always ideal, but it is the reality – and it is also a responsibility that comes with being a leader.

Personally, I would rather accept some wrong decisions than spend too much time deliberating instead of ?acting. The only caveat? That we learn from those mistakes, then use that knowledge to make better decisions in the future.

An environment of psychological safety?

To do so, business leaders must make efforts to cultivate an environment of psychological safety within their organizations. Our teams and employees must feel as though it is acceptable to make mistakes. This enables them to think creatively, take calculated risks, and create room for impactful decision-making. When things do go wrong, we will then be able to take a step back, zoom out, and attempt to discover the root cause of why a particular mistake was made. From there, we can begin to improve.

This can be tricky in any setting, much less an international business environment: different cultures have different reasons for being embarrassed of or wanting to avoid mistakes. The concept of “saving face,” for example, or job security in countries where employee rights are not as strong as they are in other parts of the world. ?

There is a multitude of similar factors that may cause making or admitting to a mistake more difficult for individual employees. Again, this is the responsibility of a business leader: to ensure that his or her teams can be open, direct, and productive –?all while understanding that mistakes are not only acceptable, but part of the process.

Iteration, balance, and blame?

As with most things in life, an overly positive or negative approach to a mistake-enabled culture can potentially be harmful. Allowing mistakes is great. Failing to learn from them? Not so much. Any time a mistake is made, we should be looking for what went right, then using that to iterate, develop new approaches, and hopefully create solutions that lead to (more) successful results.

The same goes for placing blame. When a mistake does occur, according to a Harvard Business Review article, organizations and employees should focus on “’what happened’ instead of ‘who did it.’” This can be accomplished through encouraging employees to report both large and small mistakes, then collaborating to analyze them and move forward. “Those that catch, correct, and learn from failure will succeed,” the article states. “Those that indulge in the blame game will not.”

As organizations, business leaders, teams, and employees, one thing is certain: there is no such thing as a mistake-free world. Understanding this is the first step. Learning to position ourselves for success based on our failures comes next.

Now that’s a fact for which there can be no mistake.?