Aug 29th, 2024
Business Insights
Nothing to Fear
Written by: Craig Vosper, Chief Delivery Officer
How you manage failure is a sign of your strength and ability to adapt. You cannot live a consequential life that is ruled by the fear of failure. You cannot live an effective life if you do not acknowledge and adjust to past failures. These two truths apply to organizations as well as individuals and you must build a culture that addresses them both.
At Clientek, we work with numerous organizations, and it has become easy to identify those that have a culture that fears failure. In these organizations, leaders will try to build up walls and silos to keep their efforts and teams isolated. They will hide mistakes to avoid notice even to the detriment of the organization.
The entire culture turns into one of self-preservation, with everyone focusing on ways to avoid making mistakes and being noticed. These behaviors become normalized, and everyone believes that these precautions are the way to do business. This makes it difficult to help these organizations improve as even the idea of change could lead to a failed attempt at it.
On the other hand, organizations that do not fear failure promote innovative ideas and experiment with ways to improve their organization and their products. Their leaders are open with their teams and work closely with others to identify problems and solve them.
They also deal with failure in a positive way. They review failures and determine what steps to take to avoid or mitigate them in the future. They use each failure as a chance for their resources to learn how to be better and grow.
I have been lucky to be part of an organization that considers failure and the learnings it provides as an important way to improve for our customers. We give our teams opportunities to do the best they can for our clients. We provide them with as much support as possible and when they do fail, we collaborate with them to develop new practices.
I honestly believe nothing useful comes without failure. No person or organization can grow without it, and we all want to be part of something that could become more!