Get comfortable with failure – are you kidding me?
It’s true, the more we fail, the more resilient we become but WOW- we do sometimes get a bashing along the way.
There was a great debate started recently at Harvard ,led by the MIT Digital Initiative and Cap Gemini, the CEO of the largest steel producer in the U.S., John Ferriola of Nucor, stated that “if we, through our actions, encourage our teammates to fear failing, they simply will not stretch the limits of their capabilities or the limits of their imaginations.” In the same report, Janelle Sallenave, formerly the Head of Customer Support at Uber, said “This is a company that is obsessed with what we call experiments. Everybody is encouraged to, whatever it is that they’re working on, reimagine how it could be better,
How can we as employers create a safe environment so that we don’t challenge the mental health and stability of our colleagues:
· Call out that performance will be measured by level of ingenuity and initiative and not by colleague’s ability to play it safe and then ensure all senior leaders live and breathe this
· Ask colleagues to celebrate their strengths so they experiment with wisdom and confidence
· Build a team where you don’t need to micro manage – Sinek said “When we tell people to do their jobs, we get workers. When we trust people to get the job done, we get leaders.” Make sure you are hiring and developing a capable team
· If you are experimenting with new initiatives allow them to run independently from the usual way of doing business because, by definition, they may require a new set of processes to be successful. This way you create a safe environment and reduce the level of uncertainty across teams. Uncertainty creates anxiety and we want to avoid this at all costs
If you would like more tools and techniques to improve business performance and the mental health of your teams, check out www.letsgethealthy.co.uk
