Mistakes are important.....!

As long as I can remember, since our childhood we were told by our parents, teachers and elders to do things carefully and not to make any mistake. In school, the grading system penalized us for making mistakes. At home, our pocket money was at stake when we made a mistake. A fair ask by our parents and teachers, yet what gets ingrained in our mind is that making mistakes can be costly. Hence, we should try our best to stay out of making a mistake which in the long run becomes a habit, a new normal. It makes us cautious and drives our behavior accordingly. But there is a BIG pitfall of this behavior especially when we start working as professionals.

With the above approach, what we are losing out is the Entrepreneurial spirit i.e. ability to take risk, agility to act and drive decision making faster. The behavior to be super cautious makes our ability to act faster and get things done slower. We get into the habit of "Save Your Back" rather than to execute something faster.

The other drawback of this behavior is that we are mentally not ready to deal with Failures. In all our appraisals, we are just hoping to hear a great feedback. We all feel that we have done our jobs well. Everyone wants to be a rock star, but question is can everyone become one?

We loose the ability to keep things behind you, and move on and focus on building capabilities for the future. We keep thinking about our failures more rather than the success that is waiting for us if we act right, be entrepreneurial in our spirit and act faster and with agility.

My experience as a professional says that in this asymmetric world, where you don't get rewarded just for performance but also on how you navigate in the environment, one needs to act fast, maintain a balance between quality and speed and drive outcomes. This requires calculated risk taking abilities. One need to live with the fact that you and your team will make mistakes and it is perfectly OK, till you keep learning and not repeating them. As a Leader, one needs to mature and accept this rather than go with the pedagogy of that you need to create the perfect world. If that was so, all of us will be out of jobs soon and there won't be any fun left in the complex world we deal with.