Retail

RETAIL FAILURE

Learn From Failure & Grow

A Harvard Business School webinar this week was on learning from our failures.  A premise that we remind ourselves of in sayings such as “If we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it” and others in every culture in the world.  Growing up, it was constantly hammered into me that failure is bad, success is good.  Over and over.  The world seemed to be very clearly divided between good and bad and it wasn’t until later down the timeline, that the grey areas in life start to become apparent.  There is a direct correlation between maturity and the ability to deal with those grey areas in life.  As a manager, it can be very difficult to deal with a grey area.  A real human being vs. a policy or procedure may pull at all aspects of a human being.  Intellectual debate, emotional attachment and sometimes even physical effects can be triggered as we try to reconcile all these energies and establish a win-win situation.  While many companies will state that they have an “open door” policy how many times do we shoot the messenger for bringing that wonderful tidbit of information at 4:55 pm on Friday.  We know we have to deal with it but I don’t believe it makes anyone’s day a wonderful occurrence.  We know we have to keep notes on our team for review time because our impressions tend to be what has happened most currently.  If our recollections are of a recent failure and not success, the individual being reviewed could have a very nasty time.  Even if the failure was close to a career ending event, we do not want it to wipe out what may have been a record year. 

So we as managers know we need to discover failure, address it and manage it, how much of our time is really spent towards this?  How many of us have “Discover failure” on our to do lists?  Sound a little absurd?  I know I have never written such an item down.  As many times as I have encouraged people not to be afraid, that I was not going to tear their heads off if they brought me bad news, it wasn’t anyone’s favorite thing to do.  It is one of those evil necessities that business brings to our world.  The welcomed results that come from discovering failures or disappointing outcomes are well documented.  We will first drill down on some of the whys before we get to outcomes.

In organizations that individuals learn to be comfortable with know knowing, not being right or reporting mistakes have precious espionage so to speak about their company.  Some companies have such a culture that they actually have to hire in cognito reporters to let them know what is actually going on.  One of my most hated processes is duplication of effort and this to me is one of the worst.  Degrees of failure can range anywhere from out and out insubordination to controlled failure in a scientific environment.  Depending on the degree of difficulty it may be a challenge to pin down where the variation from the desired outcome may be.  As well, the spill over effect and impact on others can be tied exponentially to the failure. 

MORE TO COME  PT. 2