Learn. Try. Fail. Learn.

We are naturally wired to succeed in life. There are various examples that you can find in your day to day life which demonstrate that, despite our tendency to stumble and grumble, our innate power to get up and learn from our experiences and push our way to success makes us who we are today - a better version of ourselves.

Did you botch that plumbing job under your sink? Did you get it right the next time? What about that recipe you were trying to follow? Did the food end up tasting better the second time around? Did you not achieve the expected result on that marathon you've prepared for? How did it go the next time? We are not necessarily getting it right at the first or second attempt, but it's in those moments when we fail that we walk away with one of life's precious gifts: our ability to learn and improve. Our journey to success always starts and ends with learning.

It's OK to Fail

This concept applies to various areas of our life and not just our personal one. Considering we're spending 40 hours a week in the office, in addition to the fact that our careers occupy a very personal part of our life, it's time that we truly believe in the value of learning and improving at work instead of concentrating on getting things done.

We need to start focusing more on how the job is done rather than just 'get it done'. I could argue that the former approach delivers better, more sustainable, and solid results for your organization than the latter. One of those philosophies is also they key to unlocking the innovative capabilities in your team too. How good is your innovation strategy if it's not fueled by curiosity, learning, trying, failing, and learning again?

However, with mounting pressure from senior leadership, high-profile project commitments, and outdated progress tracking metrics that emphasize a green light status over delivering value to your customer, it's not that simple. Your people can and will start feeling encouraged to cut corners, burn bridges, and even bullying in order to reach that finish line. This can also promote favoritism between employees, encourage bad work ethics, and negate the effectiveness of collaboration and building relationships.

Perhaps nowadays most corporate cultures are promoting the importance of collaboration and teamwork, and maybe yours is too. I am not here to challenge your corporate culture, I am only aiming to promote ethical and radical leadership strategies. When it comes to this subject specifically, it comes down to you as a leader to influence the most crucial building block of any organization: Your team.

Build the Foundations

Lets start with hiring the right people. We need to start placing more emphasis on more valuable qualities such as resiliency, the ability to persevere, the drive to learn, and the courage to try something new. Someone who 'gets the job done' might not necessarily hold all of your right traits for the job anymore. You need to understand from your candidates what challenges they've faced on one or more of their most rewarding projects, and how they overcame them. Try fostering an environment where a candidate feels safe talking about their failures by speaking about your own first.

Think of yourself first when you're trying to tell your team "it's okay if we fail". Use yourself as an example - confront your own failures and be open about them. Show your team how you've learned from your own misses and used them to empower your subsequent attempts at success. Not only is this a prime example of you acting out your own values, but humility strengthens the trust between yourself as a leader and your team. It humanizes you.

Instead of penalizing your employees for failures, help them discover the value of lessons learned. Don't take work away from them, instead explain to them that the journey of learning can start with failure, but if approached wisely can lead to a bigger success. Offer them a helping hand when they need it and help them refocus on the goal in the distance, and how it would truly feel to finally reach it. Be their coach, and not their judge.

Reward Learning and Development

How does coaching work in our favor here? Coaching emphasizes self-discovery, learning, trying and evaluating options. It's not about providing a solution to the problem and moving forward to the next one. Instead, it's about how the coachee chooses to move forward. It's also about assessing their results, and if things don't work out, they'll go back to the drawing board to re-evaluate their options again. The more the coachee engages in 'trying and learning', the more committed they become to achieving their objectives while improving on their own performance. They will also learn through that cycle, that failing, is only a part of the discovery process.

Start being prudent with who you reward for top performance and focus on what they are being rewarded for. Your top employees that receive performance awards need to exemplify the same values that you are promoting yourself within your team or organization. Emphasizing the importance of learning is one thing that you can promote through gratitude and recognition, and learning needs to allow room for failing first. It's okay if your top performer didn't get it right the first time.

It Starts with You

Before your team can adopt that philosophy, as always, the shift in perspective starts with you. The leader. Begin by changing your own perspective on your own failures. Look at other areas in life where failure is not considered the end of the line. Sports are a perfect example. I draw a lot of inspiration from sports, and there are several sports that you could look to in order to gain a different perspective on failure. I leave you with this quote by Francis T. Vincent, Jr., a former Major League Baseball commissioner

"Baseball teaches us, or has taught most of us, how to deal with failure. We learn at a very young age that failure is the norm in baseball and, precisely because we have failed, we hold in high regard those who fail less often-those who sit safely in one out of three chances and become star players, I also find it fascinating that baseball, alone in sport, considers errors to be part of the game, part of its rigorous truth"