When you make a mistake, the feeling of failure doesn’t have to be the only thing you get. It should also teach you something in order not to fail the next time. It can teach you what you should avoid and not waste your time on. You can also learn what helps you, although it may not be obvious at first, claims an article on the management-issues.com website.
Get used to failure and take lessons from them
You need to acknowledge the positive role of failure. It can serve as an opportunity to learn. Furthermore you can take lessons from a failure and give them to other people. The failure may only be a misstep, the outcome may still be a success. All inventions started as failures initially. Only hard work and relentless vision enabled them to eventually become real things.
Get back into game faster
Of course, no one likes to fail. You must understand, however, that failure is not purely evil. Disappointment still hurts and failure can hit us hard, but we need to be able to recover as quickly as possible. At Genetech, a firm producing pharmaceutics, there are leaders incentives to flag up any failing projects. It is a wise approach, since it helps the company to stop wasting money and other resources on something that isn’t working.
The culture of your company heavily influences the approach people have toward failure. When the culture is one of low self esteem or fear, people conclude that something is wrong with them and they try to escape problems by hiding them. You want your people to view failure as something that can be solved. You want your people to be capable of finding a solution even when currently situation is not good. You don’t want them to work in a climate of fear and aggression.
When you are successful, be even more cautious
When you are being praised, it is often a result of past decisions that are now bearing fruits. However, you can be making bad decisions at the very same time you receive the recognition for having decided correctly in the past. In this case, you are currently feeling like you cannot make a mistake. On the other hand, don’t be afraid to take risks again. Success is often proportionate to the number of reasonable experiments that you carry out.
-jk-