I was listening to a pretty successful entrepreneur the other day. The point he made really clicked with me. His success was not based on his earlier success, but his failures. It was nice that his customers reached their goals. But what got him to study deeper and work more on his service, was the fact that about 30 % of his customers quite did not make it.
The failure of customers was the reason for future success. There is a huge wisdom in this. It applies to every single business. If you focus on maintaining the winning formula, you will be beaten by your rivals. You might wonder why, when you have the winning formula? The answer is in your rivals failure. They study why they failed and learn. They learn how to create a new winning formula. If you are not looking at your failures, if you are not challenging your own ways, you will perish.
It is not as terrible, as it may sound. There are thousands of businesses making it over decades. They don’t have a magic wand, they have a culture. That what getting failure to become wins really is about. A matter of culture, of a way to look at a failure. The traditional way is to say ”I’m never doing that again”. And drop the case keeping doing what has proven to be working. It is natural, as it fits in our brains way of preserving energy and avoiding the risk of a new approach. Building a culture, where we don’t let the word ”failure” to limit us, is no more difficult than having a casual Friday. Once you have the culture, then your business, your team will be able to be successful also on long term.
What does it take, to build such a culture? Culture is the outcome of leadership, the leaders way of using emotional intelligence. It starts with the leaders ability and willingness to accept failures. There is a much more challenging step to take after that. The leader must share the mistake with people. His/her mistake, as that is the only way to build the culture where people are ready to share their mistakes. A mistake shared and invitation to find a solution is what builds the culture. A failure will then convert to a lesson learnt, a future success.
Do we have to make all the mistakes by ourselves? Absolutely not, but in business just copying the solution often is not giving the winning formula. When you know your business fundamental elements; mission, vision and values, then connect those to the solution and make appropriate adjustments. This way you are not only building a winning formula, but a winning formula which cannot be stolen or copied! And as the culture gets stronger, you will start to see more and more opportunities. You start to see, that even when things went well, there are lessons to learn. That means the mistakes you and your team are making will be smaller! You will go from occasional major changes to an easy small step based development. What to many organizations is a pain, is a walk in the park for you.
Leading your emotions starts with understanding which features are stopping you from accepting and sharing mistakes. What are you really afraid of? What beliefs you have, that require you to be always right? To get forward in your thinking, you need to ask a few questions yourself A) if you hide a mistake today, what happens when the mistake is too big to be hidden? and B) if you get everyone to build future, how much more you could achieve whit supportive and committed people? The sooner you start, the smaller mistakes you need to share and the faster you get results!
Failure turns to your benefit, when you turn your emotional intelligence to work in the right way. Actually, there are no more failures, but smaller and bigger lessons to learn in order to ensure better future!
If you want to take the fast track in using your emotional intelligence, get in touch with me! Send an email to kari@johtajuustaito.fi. I’m serving people all over the world!