Each Sunday our goal is to share a piece of gold with you. Some small piece of information that helps you to have a better week and achieve a better outcome.  

We have all heard about embracing failure and how we must learn from our mistakes. Back in the 70’s this wasn’t the norm in business, but in today’s world, it is pretty common.  

However, I think there are a few risks that we need to pay attention to as leaders. Specifically, failing without learning and letting it become an excuse.  

Don’t get me wrong. We have to give grace. We have to allow people to fail and use those failures to gain the wisdom to be better. However, we also have to make sure we put the processes and routines in place within our business to ensure we learn and improve from the mistakes as well as share the wisdom gained with those that need to know.  

Within JMARK, we do retrospectives after every project and every major initiative to ensure we are constantly improving. This process outlines what went right, what went wrong, what should be done in the future to prevent any issues, what processes need to change, as well as taking feedback from stakeholders to ensure we focus on the overall experience of those involved.  

It is hard to carve out and make the time for these processes to occur, but I can assure you that it will pay big dividends. The improvements that we have consistently seen have increased our velocity and our ability to reduce disruptions.  

The other piece that is worthy of attention is that the idea of embracing failure can become an excuse. By using the retrospective or a similar process, we can set the expectation that failure is ok within an organization as long as we learn from it and don’t repeat the same mistakes over and over again.  

I have seen the mentality of some become such that, because we are to embrace failure, we can then become very passive. In these cases, the ownership of the failure is not turned into actions that focus on doing everything reasonable to never repeat the mistakes made.  

As leaders it is our responsibility to focus on coaching our team through failure in such a way that it is an educational process with the expectation of improvement. If we don’t take the time to discuss the improvements necessary and instead treat them passively, so will our team.  

Lastly, I’ll say that there are times when failure is the medicine that we need. We need the gut check, the reminder that we’re not perfect, and the realization that we must learn and evolve. Failure is a tremendous teacher, if (and only if) we are an engaged student.  

The goal of AoD is to build better leaders who run better companies and change the world. Part of learning from failure is knowing the right communication pathways within the business. If you’d like a copy of our Communication Pathways Template, purchase your copy of Adapt or Die here and then go to adaptordie.com/assets to get started. I hope you enjoy it and it brings some clarity and process to your internal communications!