Lessons Learned: I recently had a longtime colleague tell a story of how another colleague failed miserably at attaining the objective of an initiative with managing the team. The person whom failed handled the situation admirably and set a great precedent that I wanted to share. First, they acknowledged that it was a failure that ultimately became a great success. However they did not tell of a later success that was similar in circumstance to get past the focus on the past failure as most have in similar conversations. Instead, they told of the mistakes they had made in the failure, what they learned from those mistakes and how they led to that person advancing professionally at quite an impressive rate by adapting to prevent repeating the same mistakes. Second, the person acknowledged that failure, albeit undesirable, is the key to adaptation and internal growth. If you succeed at every attempt the first time you will have little ability to repeat with slight alteration to obtain a different result. The result of a lack of equity in failure and success can often be observed when a person is promoted too quickly and becomes overwhelmed in trying to manage the added responsibility without having previously experienced and adapted to a sufficient amount of failure. Finally, we concluded in agreement that in success must lie equity between failure and achievement. Not because you can’t appreciate one without the other but because we learn from failure and obtain from achievement. I don’t know about you but there are many things I have not achieved that I intend to. As such, I have much failure and learning ahead.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 22:58:39 +0000
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