Learning From Your Mistakes – 4 Steps To Turn Failure Into Success

As with most kids on summer break, my girls have been spending part of their days taking swimming lessons to help advance their skills in this particular sport. While attending one of their lessons, I noticed something that was reminiscent of what many companies go through when managing the growth of their organization.

For one of their lessons, my daughter’s swim teacher asked the students in her class to swim the length of the pool and then toss a ball into the basketball net. One by one, the kids took their turn swimming across the pool and attempting to varying degrees of success in getting the ball into the net.

When it was my daughter’s turn, she swam toward the basketball net and stopped to one side to take her shot. On her first try, she bounced the ball off the rim of the net. In her next shot, she tried to throw the ball with more force, which ended up sending the ball past the net and over to the other side. Although she tried and missed another two times to get that ball into the net, she never once showed any sign of wavering in trying to succeed, even though she was clearly having no luck with this exercise.

After her class, I applauded her for being so determined to get that ball in the net, but I also had a question for her – why didn’t she just swim to the front of the net where she could have had an easier time shooting the ball? As soon as I asked her this, she gave me this sheepish smile, now realizing how she had made the task harder for herself simply because of where she chose to take the shot.

Watching her single-minded focus in performing this task reminded me of how many organizations and their leaders can also get so fixated on taking one particular route to achieve a given objective, to the point that making a simple improvement like shifting their starting position becomes a challenging prospect. Of course, part of the problem is that there is such a great fear in attempting something different, out of concern that it might lead to failure, that many organizations have become rather risk-adverse, a sentiment that has been further exacerbated by today’s economic environment.

The reality, of course, is that failures – both small and significant ones – remain par for the course of doing business in today’s global economy, regardless of whether times are good or not. With that in mind, here are four steps that leaders can take to make sure their team is able to learn from these failures, while still keeping their eyes looking forward on reaching their objective.

1. Keep your team’s focus on the end goal and not on individual outcomes
As most of us know, it’s easy to become frustrated when we keep experiencing failures which prevent us from reaching our goals. Indeed, for most human endeavours, we view being successful as reaching a given target in as few attempts as possible, a big reason why those get-rich-quick schemes remain very popular despite common sense debunking the reality of their claims.

It’s also no doubt why the story of how many failures Thomas Edison endured before creating his light bulb prototype still stirs our collective imagination, as it’s hard to imagine that success could occur after hundreds of failed attempts. Of course, one thing that is clear about Edison’s story is that he was less concerned about individual outcomes as he was about reaching his goal of creating a longer-lasting light bulb.

So while leaders should encourage their team to achieve some quick wins to keep them motivated, it’s also critical that leaders direct their team to worry less about individual outcomes and get them to focus instead on reaching the desired goal behind their shared efforts.

2. Make time to review and assess what issues/obstacles arise from your team’s efforts
I’ve noticed that there’s been several articles written lately that speak of the importance of “failing fast” in the process of innovation and change. While there is some merit to this notion, the problem is that it’s too easy for leaders and organizations to focus on failing quickly than allowing their team to fail effectively. By this, I’m referring to giving your team time to reflect and review on why the desired outcome wasn’t reached, in order to understand why they encountered the roadblocks they did. By making time for such measures, your team can adjust their approach in order to resolve these issues while maintaining their sights on the end goal.

In the case of my daughter’s swimming lesson, she kept throwing the ball without evaluating why she was having such a hard time getting it in the net. While she changed certain variables like throwing the ball harder, this only resulted in the ball going further away from her target. Had she taken the time to examine the situation, she would’ve come to the same conclusion I had that she should shift her position to throw from the front and not from the side in order to succeed in getting the ball into the net.

3. Encourage a sense of determination within your team
It’s also important to remember that just because you’re “failing fast” doesn’t mean you’re going to reach your target faster. As such, a more important message for leaders to relay to their team is to encourage a sense of determination, which will help them to hang in there for the long haul and not give up so soon simply because those early failures are preventing them from reaching the desired outcome.

For some employees, this drive will be naturally present and they will be unwavering in their efforts despite whatever setbacks come their way. For others, these failures can be a source of frustration or discouragement, so be sure to make time to encourage these employees to ignore these setbacks and to keep at it, reminding them of the first point I wrote about, of focusing more on the end goal than on the individual outcomes.

4. Don’t worry about variables you can’t control
Whether it’s in the business arena or personal affairs, whenever we find ourselves facing obstacles that prevent us from reaching our goals, it’s a common response to start worrying mostly about those aspects behind our failure that we have no control over. Ironically, worrying about those variables that we have no control over is a self-protective response, something that basically steers us away from taking any steps to address those aspects behind our failure that we can do something about.

With today’s economic challenges, it’s easy for leaders and their organization to blame outside factors for the failures they are currently enduring. However, the reason why some companies are having an easier time treading water and in some cases thriving, is because they’ve chosen to ignore those variables they have no control over, focusing instead on those issues they can correct in order to resolve to some degree the failures they’ve encountered.

In a society that celebrates winners and winning outcomes, it’s only natural that businesses and their leaders want their teams to pull out more wins by avoiding risky approaches that can lead to failures. However, by recognizing not only the inevitability that mistakes will happen, but embracing how you can turn these failures to your advantage, leaders can help their team to gain insights they might not have otherwise obtained. Insights which can help your organization to not only face the challenges of today, but the opportunities that might be lying in wait in the years to come.