Ask yourself as a manager, Director or Owner of a business, do you tolerate failure?
The Managing Director at a company where I previously worked could not deal with the idea of failure and went all out to expel it from the organisation. Many of you are probably thinking well “what’s wrong with that”?
Well with any issue there are 2 sides, but there is growing evidence in research* suggesting that organisations that accept and even reward failure in some forms are making real progress against the flow like leaping salmon as others simply follow the flow of the river with everyone else.
That sounds like an exaggeration, doesn’t it, so let’s have a think about it.
We are all human and our desire to experiment and improve the status quo is innate. Why, therefore do most leaders feel that innovation in processes and procedures should remain at the Board level? Currently, the response to the economic climate has been on the whole one of “Get control” at any cost. But again and again, I hear stories of cost improvement measures being thought up by the people at the coal face. This, of course makes complete sense, since they do the job every day.
Whilst preparing to deliver a talk on employee engagement recently, in my research, I consistently came across stories of demotivated people as a result of the current economic climate, failing to achieve to deliver sales targets, failing to achieve their goals. But there are companies out there who are doing better than others. Why is Google beating Yahoo? Why is Apple trouncing Microsoft?
The answer, I believe lies in allowing a culture of innovation to exist. That’s easy to say, but how do you make that happen. Well the first stage is to let your staff run with their ideas, and yes – let them fail once or twice. So go on, release your leaping salmon.
* Research carried out by Edwin Danneels & David J Teece
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