A Ritual For Failure In Your Teams
Team performance needs to have benefits that flow both internally and externally. Photo by Gianandrea Villa on Unsplash
Failure is part of the deal with work in complex environments. If your teams are trying to do something worthwhile, it's inevitable that there will be times you fall short. As a result, many of us have heard about creating a "safe to fail" environment. The idea is to acknowledge and use failure as a part of the process of making progress. Easy to say and much harder to do. This week's note shares an example of a practice that positively and proactively shifted the relationship of relationships with failure.
My favourite example of a ritual that sends a signal about the value of effort and failure is a Failure Wall that Jeff Stibel started at Dun & Bradstreet. The idea is to demonstrate that failure is an important part of operating. Here's a part of Jeff's article on how it got started:
"I took a sharpie and wrote down a few of my own failures: Things like, "Should have sold simpli.com to that little company in Silicon Valley (Google)" and "Should not have waited so long to have kids." I left a handful of markers and a few simple instructions:
Describe a time when you failed
Write what you learned
Sign your name."
Here is another point that he makes about the impact of the failure wall.
"Not only was it cathartic for individuals to expose their mistakes, but it also contributed to creating a company culture where failure could be openly acknowledged, accepted, and used as a learning tool."
This is the difference that well selected rituals can make. Actions that send signals about what is important, that put words into practice. The rituals of your team are always worth considering. Celebrating success is highly recommended. Please do it - often and wholeheartedly. Allowing space to appropriately support an environment where failure is a valuable part of learning is equally important and far less common.
Don't let this example limit your imagination on the rituals that will serve your teams. Think of what is important to you and consider ways to put that into action so you can send strong and consistent messages that guide team members to the right way of working.
Some questions for you to consider in your teams:
What is something that is important to your team's performance?
Are you sending signals that support this or inadvertently sending the opposite message?