he conventional wisdom isn’t quite right: Failure is not a great teacher. It’s how we reflect on failure that instructs.my own leadership-training company. Anyone who’s ever started a company knows that early on, even when things are going well, the mistakes can feel like they come fast and furious: My colleagues and I were too eager to say yes to every opportunity even when it wasn’t a good match.We hired people based on their impressive qualifications rather than value fit.
For a while, we tried to simply power through every mistake, resolving each time to simply hustle hard enough to negate it. An employee left once it was clear they weren’t a value fit? We’d just hire the next person even more quickly. Maybe we’d make a few small tweaks to the interview process. But inevitably, it wouldn’t be long before we’d run into another problem.
Until we had a moment of reckoning: Mistakes were piling up, but there was no room in the way we worked to reflect on them—and over time, it became clear to me that my team was missing a valuable opportunity. We needed norms, values, rituals that allowed us to slow down and spend some time with our failures.Right now more than ever, complexity, change, and uncertainty are baked into the way we work.
It’s a goal that’s easier said than achieved when admitting to failure goes against our basic human wiring. Research has shown just how psychologically devastating it can be, triggering
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