I’ve been watching a lot of sports lately — ask my wife and she’ll tell you I always watch sports, which is kind of true — and a thought occurred to me. It doesn’t bother me that players make mistakes. What is mind blowing and frustrating is how often they make the same mistakes.
A friend of mine, Cam Gross, who has done a lot of work for Best Buy once told me the company’s philosophy on making mistakes. He said doing so was encouraged, even expected. But ONLY if the employees and the company learned from them. In other words, it wasn’t ok to keep making the same mistakes over and over again. My guess is that could end up costing you your job.
You’ve heard it a million times — we all make mistakes. We have to in order to learn the best way to do things. And hopefully our companies are like Best Buy and they give us the opportunity to fail in the short term so we can succeed in the long term.
Brands need to give their employees the right to make mistakes. But in turn, we need to be willing to acknowledge when things don’t go like we thought they would. And we have to agree to change and do it better next time. Otherwise, it makes no sense for companies to give us some rope and our ability to progress and evolve as people and brands becomes significantly hampered.
So how do we show that we learned from a mistake? Well, it’s that first step that’s the hardest — admitting you were wrong. What most people still don’t get is that embracing failure and sharing what you learned from it is a sign of strength. It’s a characteristic found in good leaders. Even if your boss or colleagues jump your case in the short term, they will respect you more in the long term.
So don’t be afraid to fail. But do be afraid to not learn from your failure. There is a distinct difference.
[...] It’s true, we all make mistakes. What matters is how you address them after the fact. Do you learn from them or are you doomed to repeat those same mistakes? In his recent blog post, Justin Goldsborough addresses how to pick yourself up after mistakes, and how to learn from them. [...]