3 Leadership Tips to Establish an Environment of Fail-Fast-Forward

    

One of the most interesting themes emerging from today’s “New Leadership Playbook” that many fail-fast-forward-2organizations are trying to utilize is something called the “Fail-Fast-Forward” culture where leaders are being encouraged to create environments for their teams to innovate through learning from mistakes.  One of the biggest drawbacks of this approach - according to most business professionals who try to lead and execute innovation - is they find themselves being “blamed for failure” if their attempt at innovation doesn’t work the first time.  This blame can create a toxic culture and an environment where the team will never want to try to innovate again because they don’t want to be blamed for failure again.  People are very sensitive to it and may eventually leave your organization because of it.

This vicious cycle has created environments and cultures within organizations of stagnation, complacency, and an overall inability to remain competitive.  In my opinion, everyone in an organization needs to take ownership of this and embrace the tools needed to encourage everyone in the organization to try new things and learn quickly from their mistakes.  Most leaders will tell you that one of the most frustrating things they deal with is the same employees making the same mistakes over and over again without learning and moving forward because of their learnings. What’s needed is an accepted method where everyone agrees on is a process for making a mistake, learning from it, and moving forward without making the same mistakes again.

The big question is how do leaders establish that sort of environment and find the right balance of providing feedback, coaching, and disciplinary guidance when things go poorly?

Based on research, business dialogues with leaders, and my own experiences, I present three quick ideas that you can implement immediately for positive results and culture change:

Conduct a Mistake Audit

Develop a survey and anonymously capture all of the mistakes people have made and then see how many of the people who made the mistakes feel as though they were encouraged to learn from the mistake and try again quickly.  Conversely, also determine how many people who made mistakes feel they live in the culture of the “Blame Game” and try to quantify it on a scale of 1-10 with a 10 being a culture of a toxic swamp.

It’s critical that you share the results openly and honestly and make sure you are taking some actions if you think actions need to be taken.

Provide People with Innovation Time

Over the past 3 years I’ve asked about 1,000 managers where they are when they get their most innovative ideas.  I hear; “In the shower,” “Going for a run, “Cooking” and many other similar venues.  What I have never heard is a manager saying they get their most innovative ideas sitting at their desk.  If you want to quickly build a culture that breaks through and embraces failure as the first step to success, then you must give people time to thinks things through and to be innovative. If you do this, you will create a very positive culture and you will have a less likelihood of failure because the ideas will be well thought out.

Walk the Talk

Have brainstorming sessions with your team to improve products, processes, relationships, and any other parts of your business you want to maintain or enhance.  When you are near completion, build a prioritized list of changes for improvement and then jump and walk the talk.  Try something new and when you fail, take ownership of it and demonstrate how you can fail and move forward beyond the failure fast. During this process share with everyone on your team how important it is to learn from the mistakes and fix them as quickly as you can.

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Robert Brodo

About The Author

Robert Brodo is co-founder of Advantexe. He has more than 20 years of training and business simulation experience.