I don’t remember many failures in my life…not because I haven’t failed, but because I didn’t make a point to label things as failures. Life always goes forward to me, not backward. There was a book published in 2000 called, “Failing Forward.” It promoted the idea that successful people transform failures into just the next step forward.
But do companies really accept failures? In a highly competitive pay-for-performance environment, a failure can weigh heavier than your entrepreneurial efforts and great ideas. When stacked next to a colleague who got everything done without a blip, it’s hard to celebrate the person who didn’t get something done but demonstrated some nice effort. In my career, I’ve been coached to “not let perfection be the enemy of good.”
My company has an initiative called, “Faster Forward” – a scheme to accelerate becoming the best supply chain in the world. At the end of last year, leadership wanted to move rapidly to implement four new metrics – so rapidly, our IT systems could not be changed in time for the data collection. We were literally holding training meetings telling people, “OK – in the box that says SURE Events, that’s where you should enter the number of Significant Good Saves.” You can imagine that our community was confused and frustrated – even more so when two months later we changed the definition on how to calculate the metric. We moved too fast; we didn’t get sufficient input and people are going to remember this mess and pain for a long time. But we are failing forward – we are still moving forward with the new metrics and adapting as we go. It’s just that users are grumbling about having to make adaptations. It remains to be seen how this bumpy road gets interpreted at performance review time.
But do companies really accept failures? In a highly competitive pay-for-performance environment, a failure can weigh heavier than your entrepreneurial efforts and great ideas. When stacked next to a colleague who got everything done without a blip, it’s hard to celebrate the person who didn’t get something done but demonstrated some nice effort. In my career, I’ve been coached to “not let perfection be the enemy of good.”
My company has an initiative called, “Faster Forward” – a scheme to accelerate becoming the best supply chain in the world. At the end of last year, leadership wanted to move rapidly to implement four new metrics – so rapidly, our IT systems could not be changed in time for the data collection. We were literally holding training meetings telling people, “OK – in the box that says SURE Events, that’s where you should enter the number of Significant Good Saves.” You can imagine that our community was confused and frustrated – even more so when two months later we changed the definition on how to calculate the metric. We moved too fast; we didn’t get sufficient input and people are going to remember this mess and pain for a long time. But we are failing forward – we are still moving forward with the new metrics and adapting as we go. It’s just that users are grumbling about having to make adaptations. It remains to be seen how this bumpy road gets interpreted at performance review time.