Mistakes happen. Everyone makes them. From the best athletes in the world who spend 6 hours a
day training, to the CEOs of the most successful companies like Apple, Tesla, Amazon, and many others.
One of the core mantras of leadership development is to encourage people to make and learn from mistakes. Much of the modern thinking around leadership, change, disruption, and the “new normal” is about creating an environment and culture of innovation where mistakes are encouraged, and key learnings embraced. Like many entrepreneurs, Mark Zuckerberg believes, “Don’t even bother avoiding making mistakes, because you’re going to make tons of mistakes and the important thing is to learn quickly from the mistakes you make and not give up.”
As all leaders know, success isn’t magic, and it isn’t luck. Many wise and experienced leaders will share that before you can truly succeed, you must learn to fail and get better at your core value propositions. Without repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
I just finished leading a session in the Middle East with a group of high potential leaders featuring a “disruption business simulation.” One of the participants shared an interesting quote when mapping out their company’s strategy, “Teams that make few mistakes, make little progress. Teams that make small mistakes and learn from them fast make fewer big mistakes in the future.”
The fear of failing and being humiliated has created a stigma that goes along with making mistakes. There is such a thing as a good mistake; these are made through a strong and educated action, that may have had a bad result, there is no shame in that. It is possible to learn from good mistakes and use the knowledge gained in your next action. Bad mistakes are made with little thought and effort and as a result, bad results are inevitable.
As many participants of Business Acumen and Business Leadership development workshops have learned, there are many (too many) mistakes that can be made in business ranging from a weak or non-existent business plan to overspending. Working with the wrong people who do not share your vision or complement your abilities can quickly become a big mistake. This isn’t just because of the time and money of having to find new people, but the clean-up of the chaos and drama they leave behind… and that is depending on if it was as simple as cleaning up a dropped sandwich, or as complex as cleaning up a major oil spill. Without making this mistake, you are relying on luck to find a perfect match rather than a choice made through the knowledge gained in making that mistake in the first place.
As business history tells us, mistakes happen whether you are starting up, or well established in the market. Kodak patented the first digital camera, but as they generated so much revenue and cash in film and traditional cameras, they didn’t pursue digital for fear it would cannibalize their core business. And of course, a decade after that decision, Kodak was bankrupt. Blockbuster Video was destroyed by Netflix because they invented streaming and have disrupted the entire global entertainment ecosystem. This shows that a company needs to move with technological advancements and be able to see the possibilities of the future, so there are no missed opportunities. Elon Musk sees a sustainable future and is working towards it, though he has made mistakes along the way he has learned from them instead of giving up. One of his most famous quotes is, “If something's important enough, you should try. Even if the probable outcome is a failure.”
In summary, it’s more critical today than ever before to create an innovative work environment where challenging the status quo and making mistakes is encouraged, embraced, and rewarded. More importantly, however, is to make sure there is real learning (not on a blame game atmosphere so the same mistakes aren’t made repeatedly).
