"The fastest way to success is to double your failure rate" -Said by IBM's Thomas Watson Sr.
"Failure is the stepping stone for success" - an old saying...
" We reward failures and great leaders accept their mistakes openly "- said by Jack Welch in one of his key note...
Well they are talking about right kind of excusable mistakes, not the lazy, callous, half hearted attempts.
Failure tolerant leader knows that failure is an integral part of innovation and encourage right kind of mistakes in non punitive environment.
I am trying to unfold my learning from Harvard business review article by Richard Farson and Ralph Keys and trying to share some of my mistakes done in professional life.
These leaders move beyond success and failure, they understand that mistakes are inevitable when launching innovation initiatives and look for building the knowledge gained from these mistakes. A scripted, controlled environment would never allow space for innovation, innovation leads for a change and change leads to a transformation and to create the game changers.
When a failure occurs, these leaders get engaged, analyze the mistakes, ask illuminating questions, think whether these mistakes could have been avoided. They consider the risk part of their strategy, they build exit strategy for allowing mistakes. This would help people to be more collaborative, respect each other idea, open curiosity about lessons learned.
New Ideas are most likely to emerge in the work place when leaders treat steps in the innovation process, those work and those that don't, with less evaluation and more interpretation. The Failure Tolerant Leader don't praise or penalize, instead they analyze. Human psychology states that either excessive praise or excessive punishment ruins a person's motivation. This requires engagement with employees in what they do, showing interest and giving feedback, without undermining the professional relationships or without presuming to be pals.
Notion of encouraging mistakes may seem to be alien to some of us, but it earns a great empathy and respect from employees.Again it is not about allowing sloppiness in organization, its about learn to fail intelligently and forward toward success.
Creating this kind of culture nurtures the collaboration among employees to innovate, share information. This also allows to tap the imaginations of those who are not adept at creating visibility, introverts and core talent. This creates for an environment of opportunity to further innovation, where competition stiffed creativity, openness and honesty.
Failure Tolerant Leaders emphasize that a good idea is a good idea, whether it comes from Management gurus or an obnoxious coworker.what really going on these groups is courage enhancement, by creating an atmosphere of safety and reducing the pressure to succeed, thus giving people confidence to share ideas. These leaders send clear message that constructive mistakes are not only acceptable but worthwhile. Employees once feel inhibited now suddenly feel free to express ideas, frequently contributing to the innovations that drive the company success.
I did three mistakes in my life and which led to innovation and bring potential of people, otherwise could not have been known.
Mistake 1: While i was in Sprint RPG India, we were short of Disk Space for our operations. I took initiative of loaning the disk from my previous organization and augmenting capacity, otherwise those days it might have taken at least 3-6 months to procure. Well after bringing the disk, I found out that the controller of Tandem K100 Series does not support Tandem K1000 series Optical Fiber Disks (per Tandem TAC). Hum...this created an opportunity to invent new way of interfacing...after 48 Hours hard work, I could interface the drives and give ample space for our customers store their data. How i did is irrelevant, but it paved Tandem to discover that they can interface this way too and for me lot of learning.
Mistake 2: While we launching first In bound call center in GE, we had to send FAXs over the networks to India from various customers. Those days, we still used Satellite connections and we were just installing CISCO ATM (IGX platform). After migrating to CISCO IGX, the faxes were failing intermittently, post analysis we discovered that the IGX DSP chips are not designed to support a satellite delay of 500ms. CISCO had to redesign their DSP chips to cater those latencies and moved forward in to developing countries where satellite connections are predominantly used. Win -Win...Innovation and Learning.
Mistake 3: In my previous company, one of the engineer by mistake pressed the RED button (emergency shutdown) thinking it is Door open button in of the data Center. oops, that made some 3000 servers to shutdown immediately. Well after that 300 heroes born and they worked literally 72 hours to bring them up in a controlled fashion. This procedure has become one of the best disaster recovery plan and brought out the potential of those engineers, who otherwise a silent sergeants.
I would say these are three great turning points in my professional career which paved for to be success.
Failure tolerance is to think about learning and experience not about success or failure and that's the key to coming up with break through products and processes: Viewing mistakes for the educational tools and as signposts on the road to success.
