In an article in
the Financial Times 21.09.11, Luke Johnson presents a question that he is most
commonly asked. The question is: "What makes a good entrepreneur"?
His typical answer is that self-control and self-discipline are the most
important traits. However, after he read an article about educating children,
his mind got set on another idea: What if the secret to success is failure?
Could this also be the case for good leadership?
For us as
students of a somewhat abstract subject as management is, this is a scary
thought. Who wants to make mistakes? Mistakes are as every action followed by
consequences, and in most of the cases of mistakes, bad ones. One could think
that the more mistakes one is doing, the harder it gets to be willing to take
the responsibility to make a decision. It is an irrational fear of failure. So
how can making mistakes be any good for making oneself a good leader?
There is a big
difference between making mistakes and being a failure. Mistakes, if you learn
from them, allow you to hone future actions — something that will help ensure
even greater success eventually.
It is hard to find
any standard training that makes you become a good leader. In football, we
train on the same details over and over again until we master the technique. In
business it is different. Especially today with organizations and the
companies' business-market being more multicultural and international. Managers
encounter new and more diverse problems every day. Knowing how to deal with problems
is rarely written somewhere, and it is often difficult to practice on making
the decisions enough times in order to make the right ones. It seems to be that
good leadership comes from both good and bad experiences.
As students looking
for jobs, we are constantly familiar with the word experience. To apply for a
management position, you are very often required to have some kind of
experience, either in management or in the field of business you are supposed
to be managing in. This often means that you have made decisions, good and bad,
which has helped creating the kind of character you are as a leader. Here we
agree with Mr. Luke Johnson who says that "character is made, it is not
something that you are born with". And what if this character is only used
to win, if it is used to always making the right decision, how can it then
handle itself the day something goes wrong. The day this character makes a
mistake, or somebody else of his staff makes a mistake.
Maybe it is
because of this fear of failure that makes 69 percent of workers of all levels
of an organization say in a survey that they would not want their boss's job.
(Robbins et al.) But where can you practice mistakes? Where can we do them? It
is extremely important for every employer and for every CEO to allow mistakes,
as one mistake can lead to an experience so important that it could benefit the
organization in another problematic situation. Or as Mr. Luke Johnson says:
"the secret to success is failure". If our CEO is protecting us from
making mistakes, we can never develop. And is it not challenges and struggles,
rather than easy wins and overindulgence, that makes our minds and habits
evolve?
In a world
economy that struggles, the pressure is on for every manager. A mistake in
crises can be disastrous. In this type of situation the characteristic leader
has to step up. The one who has done enough failure earlier in his career to
make successful decisions, plans and strategies. A leaders’ character is
revealed when their company is involved in a crises.
It is in crises
that the best innovations emerge. Nothing is more risky than innovating.
Innovation means doing things differently, exploring new territory and taking
risks (Robbins et al). Closing the door for failure means closing the door for
the best innovations.
We would like to
close this article by quoting a wise man, and also encourage readers to comment
on this blog post. Maybe you can tell us about some mistakes you have done, the
consequences that followed, and also, if there were any, the benefits that came
out of the mistakes.
"Character is best formed in the
stormy billows of the world".
I really agree with the idea of experience coming from the lessons of past mistakes, companies need to balance the need for their young employees to gain experience through the acceptance and encouragement of them to learn from their mistakes while at the same time maintaining their operations.
ReplyDeleteThe question is how much failure is acceptable? Because even though you might gain experience through failure, you cannot always fail.
Interesting question, Calum. It's hard to answer how much failure is acceptable, as this differs from organization to organization. Then it's up to the company to know how to gain the most out of the failures. Take a look at this interesting article about how organizations are likely to learn more from failures than from success: http://www.strategy-business.com/article/10314e
ReplyDeleteWhat I think is that it really does come down to how companies handle mistakes, failures or whatever semantics one wants to use. At the end, it's about not getting what one initially sought to get.
ReplyDeleteMistakes can be for the good and bad, from an economical standpoint but if we just simplify it with the general definition above, here are a few short things I would hypothesise about it.
- If the organization is not one of a learning "type" but primarily driven by end results only, those who makes mistakes will fall and the "leadership" will not be able to make up for it.
- On the contrary, if the organization is of a learning "type", it would also be one that has certain processes in place, i.e. critical stage analyses, feedback systems, knowledge bases, information sharing, etc. Should all these be in place, any cause for failure would be on the organization as a whole. Thus collectively, something must be done about it.
The way I see it, mistakes and failures do not make one better. It is what one does AFTER these have been "achieved". Many tend to run away from problems once they've seen them. It's the ones that face them and try to figure out how to go about them which learn a little more for the next challenge at hand.
We agree with you that what matters is how you deal with the mistakes and failures after they have occurred. However, this discussion leads to our next question, which is about how others will deal with your mistakes. What if you have a manager above you that prefers to do the tasks him/herself in cases where others are doing them in the wrong way? This is an issue that can lead to motivation problems among employees. So how do you deal with managers that do not allow you to make mistakes?
ReplyDelete