Cutting bait
Cutting bait
I had one of my college buds visit recently, to pay annual birthday homage and check on my rehab. Because we couldn’t golf, and the weather was just too perfect to spend indoors, we decided to go fishing. This was a magnanimous gesture on my buddy’s part. To put it mildly, fishing is not one of his fortes.
It’s not like we haven’t worked on it, teaching him tips and techniques, to no avail. An otherwise coordinated and athletic fellow, angling just ain’t his thing.
“I’m just a spazz,” he admitted, and so we laughed, and backed away from the poles after his third unfixable tangle.
This leads, of course, to the question: how and when to cut bait, organizationally, when a plan, strategy or tactic just isn’t working. How much time and effort do you allocate for an initiative to succeed before you say “no mas?” And what do you do afterward? Do you ignore it, blame those involved, or do you embrace it?
Most folks know the famous (if apocryphal) Thomas Edison quote about inventing the light bulb, after many, many attempts: “I’ve not failed, I have just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” Plucky fella, old Tom.
We teach our children to persevere in the face of failing as part of the learning process. As adults, and especially as organizational leaders, accepting failure becomes more complicated. How a leader handles failure, though, is a barometer for the health of the organization’s culture.
There is a difference between a failure and a mistake. Mistakes are usually the result of ill conceived or poorly planned initiatives that you can’t or don’t learn from it. (Think Wile E. Coyote.)
Failures can be built upon (see Edison, above.) And while there is no magic formula for coping with failure, there are guidelines for how to mange it in a healthy, positive and productive way.
Prepare for it. Failure happens…often. Make “what’s the plan if this doesn’t work out” part of the process. Develop contingencies; make this way of thinking part of your culture.
Dig into the failure. Make sure you understand what happened. Bring in an outsider to conduct an audit, if needed. Learn from it. Find your weaknesses and build them into strengths.
Share the lessons with all. Share the information you gather about what happened with the entire organization. Create a learning environment where your people aren’t afraid to fail.
Celebrate your failure. Who wants to work in an organization that criticizes efforts that don’t turn out well? That’s demoralizing and demeaning. Instead, celebrate failures and the lessons learned from them.
Have a failure “budget.” Make sure you plan for failing and that failure does not debilitate the organization.
After all, “[one’s] errors are…portals of discovery,” according to James Joyce. So go ahead and grab your poles!
I think much of the reluctance to deal with failure stems from the tendency to focus on who failed, rather than what failed. When failure is viewed as a problem, we look to blame someone for that problem, and that can be uncomfortable. As it should be. If anything, people who dare to try and fail should be the model.
We seem to have a problem with our success-only paradigm. I remember reading, ages ago, about someone whose plan cost the company, let's say, a million dollars. When he was called to the boss's office, he knew what was going to happen. He walked into the office, and the boss started talking about planning for the next venture. Finally the employee asked "Aren't you going to fire me?" "Fire you? I just spent a million training you!" No one is a 100% success--and if one exists, I don't want to meet him.