Give Employees Room To Fail — And Perform at Their Best

Fear of failure can cripple the potential of any organization, department, team, or employee. For companies that embrace risk — and enable individuals to stretch themselves — the potential for failure becomes an opportunity for performance, writes Srikant Chellappa, president, and co-founder, Engagedly.

“Failure is not an option.” We’ve all heard this phrase before. What started as a popular line from the 1995 film Apollo 13 has since been slapped on the covers of countless self-help books. And you’ve probably seen it shared as a meme from an out-of-touch relative in your Facebook feed.

The popularity of phrases like this tends to promote the idea of failure as something to fear. When used as a philosophy for success (re: self-help books), it ends up being terrible advice. In other words, if you’re not in a life-or-death situation, failing is essential for growth — and should be encouraged. In fact, if you rarely fail, you’re probably playing it too safe.

Failure Is an Opportunity

In work and life, failure is a great teacher. For companies like Amazon, it’s been a conduit for innovation. Leaders like Jeff Bezos are known for pushing their teams to try new things, even if that meant failing often — to be unafraid of failure. That’s how Amazon Web Services (AWS) was born. What most people don’t remember are the defeats behind the triumphant victories. For example, the Fire Phone (launched in 2014) was a spectacular failure. Despite the device being discontinued quickly, the voice recognition technology born from it led to what is now a household name — Alexa.

In his letter to shareholders in 2018, Bezos wrote, “As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.”

That growth mindset expressed by leaders like Bezos is the only way to create an atmosphere for companies to reach their highest potential, even in the face of difficult circumstances — such as the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. Those companies being unafraid to fail (in the pursuit of greatness) is what allowed for the type of innovation that resulted in not just surviving — but thriving — in hard times.

So, what’s stopping employees at so many other companies from bringing new ideas to the table? The truth is, they’re often not given a chance to.

Give Your Employees Room To Fail

To embrace a growth mindset, companies have to provide real opportunities for their people to grow and be prepared to support that growth. If processes or management styles are too punitive when errors or failures do occur, employees will avoid ever taking on any risk in their roles.

Instead, they’ll maintain the status quo. They’ll play it safe. As a result, they’ll be unable or even afraid to think outside the box to provide a better outcome for customers, their own team, and the business.

Managers play a big role when it comes to enabling behaviors that can lead to high growth in employees. For example, a good manager might give their employees stretch goals that give them a milestone for a specific task or skill beyond what their current duties require.

By doing this, the employee has an understanding of what excelling at a role can look like and is enabled to hit that marker without the risk of failing to meet what is required of them in their day-to-day duties. Even if they do fail to hit the stretch goal on the first attempt, they have a safe environment for improvement and are encouraged to reach new professional heights.

Easy solutions like this take very little effort on behalf of the company, yet it’s hard for many to put into practice. It comes down to putting effort in the right places.

If you hire a professional trainer to help you get stronger, you would expect them to add more weight to the bar over time, right? You’d even expect them to put too much weight on sometimes, to really push you. Otherwise, what’s the point? It’s those moments where you’re truly stretched that become moments of growth.

Using Technology To Stretch

Modern performance management tools make it simple to set stretch goals that are challenging, personalized, and easily measured. Using OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), managers can create goals for individuals and ensure alignment with teams and the organization.

By setting goals company-wide and having visibility into the areas where individuals, teams, and departments are shooting to stretch, a culture of growth can be cultivated.

Of course, making progress toward these goals will result in some failures. But that’s where technology can really shine. For instance, a digital platform can better facilitate consistent check-ins among employees and managers so that OKRs can be discussed in real-time, continuously.

The social aspect not only keeps managers and employees more engaged but gives teams the opportunity to publicly share appreciation and recognize peers for hitting important milestones.

For example, QuadX, a Digital Logistics and Payment Processing company based in the Philippines, had big aspirations and goals and needed a way to align the business strategy with its people. In the words of Brian Quebengco, Head of People Strategy & OD, “What allowed us to bounce back from the 2020 pandemic was having our leadership rally all of our employees toward our company purpose (Building Futurepreneurs) and two of our five core values: (1) Think Big. Do Big. and (2) Keep Moving Forward. We aligned all of our OKRs toward this to create massive focus and action to start 2021 strong. We put all of this to action in our Engagedly platform to align and communicate to the entire organization — with a result that over 80% of our organization now has OKRs that stretches people to think and act big.”

This resulted in a significant cultural shift that allowed every employee to see how their work impacts the progress of their organization, thus giving their role meaning. With real-time collaboration in these goals, people can feel connected and inspired to stretch themselves.

The Rewards in Taking Risks

Failure is never fun, but leaders who encourage their teams to take intelligent risks will find themselves providing more than an opportunity for defeat. Instead, they’ll provide great opportunities to learn, improve skills, and perform at a higher level.

Using technology to support goal-setting across an organization will give entire companies the tools to outperform their competition and be prepared when unexpected challenges arise.

When there are more opportunities to fail, there are only more opportunities to succeed. When an entire organization is encouraged to stretch, you find innovation in more places.