Managers often have the urge to swoop in and fix things themselves instead of giving their team the chance to tackle the issue. When should you step in and when should you leave things alone?
It all comes down to creating a culture where people can make mistakes. Historically, companies have treated mistakes as taboo whereas laboratories have treated them as learning experiences. Most managers have learned from their previous bosses so it requires some retraining.
This change requires two major ingredients. The first is forgiveness of the way we have been treated for our punishment. There is some satisfaction in making the “freshman” learn the way we have learned. If we want to create change, we have to drop the resentment we may not know we even carry around with us so we can move forward.
Secondly, we have to do one of the hardest things for a human being to do. In fact, it is not just us humans. You may have heard the story about the monkey trap jar – and how monkeys are captured by placing candy in a jar. Yes, not a trap, a cage, or anything worse. The candy in a jar is enough. The monkey places its hand in, grabs the candy, and makes a fist while doing so. However, it can’t get its hand out while making a fist. Then… its capturer comes in with a net and they refuse to “let go” rather than being caught and never be free again. I’m aware that this is dramatic but there is a reason. How many of us have been trapped by not letting go? How many of us have done a disservice by helping and enabling the folks entrusted to us? How have we held our companies back?
We also need to ask the question, how have we held our own businesses and our own careers back by not leveraging the full array of our company’s talent? We must let go and allow our folks to succeed or fail within the context of the org chart and job description. This is not only healthy for the organization but it is healthy for our personal lives as well.
Cultural change is not a quick fix. John C. Maxwell’s book, Failing Forward – is a great starter pack for a team open to learning about making mistakes as a stepping stone to success. An organization that treats well-intended mistakes as an experiment, learns and grows from the experience, and prevents them from happening again is like the laboratory versus the old punitive system. Adults as well as mice work much better under a reward system than they do negative reinforcement.
Here is the scary part. Letting go. Do you have the courage? Think of companies that had the courage. Tylenol had a huge mistake yet came out to create safer bottles for all medicine. Chick-fil-A closed on Sunday but flies by all the revenue of all fast food chains 6 days a week. Coke’s new Coke? It was a flop but they learned how valuable the original was. The point is, those who dare do amazing things. As Teddy Roosevelt said, “It is hard to fail, but it is worse to have never tried to succeed”. Or to borrow from Nike, “just do it”, you will not regret it.
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