You will make mistakes!

Photo: Alan Saporta

"A man's errors are his portals of discovery" - James Joyce.

"If you aren't failing, you aren't trying anything." - Woody Allen

I could have created this posting out of nothing but great quotations about mistakes and experience. Don’t just gloss over those two quotes above. Go back, read those again and spend some time internalizing them. Go ahead and really do that! I promise to wait for you.

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This posting grew out of a mentoring conversation I was having with a soon-to-be new manager but it really applies to everyone. This mentee was appropriately conscious of how damaging a bad boss can be to a team's morale and success. He was apprehensive about making mistakes in his new role given the impact it could have. I told him that it's not all about avoiding missteps - it's also about learning from those errors. The key to success is neither to dwell on your mistakes nor easily brush them aside. The key is to be sufficiently reflective and then proactive.

This idea around the benefits of making mistakes is not a new concept by any stretch. But if you are a Type A personality like me a gentle reminder every once in a while of the gifts that mistakes hold for you is necessary and welcome. To excel, to be vibrant, to be a leader you can’t always play it safe.

For example, there is no way a new manager is not going to make some misjudgments at the beginning. The path someone takes from being an individual contributor to a manager is an arduous one. That step actually requires a transformation of oneself and it is fraught with possible missteps . (Another day's post will cover that transformation.)

Most of us are not comfortable with making mistakes. We worry about the impact to our work or friends or family. We worry that we will look foolish. All those things may still yet happen. What one can count on though is that at the very least every mistake is a learning opportunity. I like to remind mentees that as painful or embarrassing as a blunder they made may feel this very blunder is likely saving them from even worse ones later on.

As the leader of organizations myself I want to be clear that I'm not thrilled when someone on the team makes a mistake but I'm not someone that thinks it's the end of the world either. I believe mistakes are a kind of investment an enlightened company (or leader) makes in an employee. Mind you this is not meant to encourage brain surgeons or policemen or firemen to make mistakes. I’m talking about the mistakes that occur outside the realm of saving or protecting lives. (This posting may apply to those areas as well but I do not feel at all qualified to discuss these issues from that perspective).

But there is one kind of mistake that as a leader I find unacceptable - and that is a repeated mistake:

“Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.” 
― George Bernard Shaw

If a mistake is repeated it is no longer an investment - it becomes an investigation. Something or someone is off so it's time to go to the next level of problem solving.

If you haven't had this perspective on mistakes I hope you'll take these ideas into consideration. If you already share this perspective hopefully this serves as a welcome reminder that I too find useful!

“You must never feel badly about making mistakes ... as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.” 
― Norton Juster