Let’s start with an important point to remember.
Everyone fails. Fact!
Nothing is perfect and by being a human being means you’re built to fail occasionally. This might sound a little depressing but as a busy human race we’ve tricked ourselves into seeing failure as a bad thing.
At Learning & Design, we don’t think failure is bad, but we agree, in the moment it can be disappointing. We have learnt to embrace our mistakes and weirdly, almost look forward to them!
When failure happens, the bit we’d like to focus on, is what you do with it. How you react, how you talk to yourself, how you share the failure with others. This is what can turn your experience around.
So, how do you learn and grow when you fail?
Embrace it and Share it
It’s all too easy to want to distance yourself from a mistake, or quickly correct it and move on. Bad idea.
We want you to embrace it, own it, and even talk about it with your team. Showing that you’re capable of making mistakes, and how you learn from them is incredibly powerful for your team to witness. A key element of Psychological Safety is not fearing making a mistake and you can prove this to your team by owning your own failure experiences and teaching them how to react with understanding and compassion.
See it. Sort it. Move on
After failing, you might experience some negative emotions, like shame, insecurity, embarrassment and sometimes even disappointment. These emotions are okay, but in small doses. We want you to move quickly so you don’t dwell on the mistake but instead focus on what and how you do to move forward. If you can, a great way to do this can be to take a nuggets of learning from the fail with you, it’s your piece of the past that will share your future.
Review and Refocus
Making a mistake is one thing. Making that same mistake again is another!
By reviewing what went wrong and identifying how you could improve or avoid another fail shows you’re personally growing and learning as you move along. It’s perfectly okay to admit you have spotted things that caused a fail, but what’s even more important is spotting the way to avoid it in the future. Sometimes it’s a minor tweak, others it’s back to the drawing board, but this is all part of experiential learning.
Understand that to fail is to lead
People in leadership roles often feel an immense pressure to get things right, first time, every time. It’s simply not possible to be perfect all day every day!
By accepting a failure, and dissolving some of the characteristics we’ve talked about in this article you are in fact leading through failure
People will be watching your every move when something goes wrong. When you embrace it, share it and create a solution you inspire others to do the same. When you move on after reviewing and refocusing you display leadership skills for others to emulate when they fail too.
We are encouraging you to make a mistake.
We want you to experience a little fail here and there.
We know that they will help you learn & grow.