Summary: Failures are bad. Learning from them is easy. Right? Well not quite. Organizations need better ways to go beyond superficial, or self-serving learning and recognition might be the right solution.
As toddlers, we learn by failing – and repeatedly so. Again and again, we keep at it till we learn and achieve our objectives (even if it is just to steal cookies from the proverbial cookie jar kept high on the shelf).
But then, school happens and failure becomes an F-word. Even the grade associated with perceived failure is F! This, unfortunately, continues into most university courses and workplaces.
You are expected to succeed – every single time.
It is easy to see the absurdity of that expectation. Even still, failure isn’t usually tolerated. It is often punished through lower reviews, lesser pay, demotion, or layoffs. It’s hardly surprising that the workforce aligns toward risk avoidance, rather than innovation and improvements.
As a result, many employees wait for someone else to fix problems. This is especially true in large organizations and institutions where the risk/reward of doing things differently is heavily skewed towards risk.
Fundamentally, the challenge is how to be tolerant of failures without adopting an “anything goes” attitude. Prof. Amy Edmondson of HBS feels that this concern is in fact based on a false dichotomy. In reality, a culture that makes it safe to admit and report on failure can coexist with high standards of performance.
The Failure Spectrum and Engagement Zones:
Edmondson presents many reasons for failure in her article. Supervisors can dive deeper to really understand the root cause of the failure. This can be revealing about the engagement levels of the employee.
Disengagement is a major cause of failure. At one extreme deviance and inattention can be consequences of active disengagement.
That doesn’t mean the current failure/action is responsible for the disengagement – in all likelyhood issues usually fester for a long time. No employee becomes actively disengaged overnight.
Common Causes of Disengagement
Common issues to employee engagement that most employers face include things like a bad job fit, uncertainty, and process complexity. When those feelings are not addressed, or worse- punished, disengagement sets in.
If the situation festers for long enough, the employee either exits or becomes actively disengaged.
While these scenarios are the most challenging, they also give management the opportunity to run active interventions and solve potential disengagement.
If failures are identified as caused by a lack of task clarity or process complexity, employers can actively avoid these issues. It is trendy to pretend that things are complex
But complexity can be self-defeating. A manager who truly understands the big picture has clarity about the team and organizational goals.
And, she should be able to alleviate primary frustrations for her team members.
Failure as Success
When failure comes from hypothetical or exploratory testing, it often serves as a basis for innovation. These are the kinds of failures that occur in a controlled fashion.
Building an “anti-fragile” (learning) organization through recognition
An organization that has a framework to handle failure is core to building a resilient business. It can thrive on the right kind of failure! .
How?
Companies can transform failure into an advantage by building a culture where failure is analyzed dispassionately. Instead of fixing blame on people, focus on what happened.
Management can walk the talk by celebrating the right kinds of failure through rewards. Social recognition – organization-wide – on things that didn’t quite work out the way they were supposed to can be a massive booster for engagement.
Eli Lilly has been doing this since the 90’s through their ‘failure parties’ to recognize intelligent and high-quality experiments that well…failed.
Check this out!
Another famous celebration of failure is the Toyota Production System (TPS). Team members are encouraged to pull the andon cord when a problem occurs. If the issue cannot be solved in under a minute, production stops till the failure is analyzed and an appropriate solution is determined.
While these are examples of large complex systems (R&D in Eli Lilly, and advanced JIT production in Toyota’s case) – companies can celebrate failures in simpler systems too: a marketing campaign that bombed, a new code algorithm that didn’t quite deliver results or even a spirited attempt to fix the WiFi routers. There is no failure too small or too large to celebrate.
The challenge is to ensure that management doesn’t do this as a one-off and fail at celebrating failure as a habit!
Conclusion
Recognizing employees for the right types of failures increases success and innovation. It helps to engage employees and decrease bad failures.
About Thanks
Thanks is a leading provider of a recognition-based platform that increases communication, builds teamwork, and makes recognition a part of company culture. Fast, easy and simple Thanks makes it easy to bring data-driven employee recognition to your entire organization. O.C. Tanner purchased the Thanks platform in 2019 to fulfill the recognition needs of smaller businesses.
Thanks customers benefit from the same decades of research in employee motivation and company culture that O.C. Tanner enterprise clients enjoy, but in a product that is geared for fast, easy and simple deployment. Whether you’re starting a recognition program or improving and expanding on what you already have, Thanks has everything you need to engage your people with effective, scalable recognition. Thanks is a subsidiary of OC Tanner.