Starting new projects with your team can be challenging. It can feel like riding a roller coaster as the team goes through ups and downs, successes and failures. Even if the team reaches an early milestone, both employees and managers often rarely talk about it or even mention celebrating success. When great achievements are not celebrated, opportunities to enhance team morale are just wasted.
However, do we only focus on the successful part?
An essential part of reaching success is falling and getting back up again. Teams sometimes feel like they have failed. For example, when someone made a mistake or the team’s intuition is later found to be wrong. This is normal, setbacks and failures are inevitable on the road to success. It is useful to get an understanding of what went wrong, how to make improvements and how to avoid these failures in the future. If you can draw lessons from failures and deal with workplace setbacks correctly with your employees, failure can be a springboard for success.
Here are a few tips to start celebrating failure:
- Learn from your (team’s) mistakes
After every project, reflect with the team on the successes and failures, sum up what you did well and what you didn’t do well. Come to a consensus about how to avoid those failures in the future.
- Reinforce inventiveness and innovation
Mistakes are an indispensable part of taking risks. The sooner you are able to make mistakes, the sooner you'll learn and move on.
- Allow new thoughts and chances
Going through failure leads to new and thrilling opportunities. When employees escape from failures, they actually miss new opportunities.
- Keep eyes open for easily avoidable mistakes
When bosses put pressure on employees to continuously succeed, errors are more likely to be made. People who work under severe stress are less effective and that they seldom report bad news. If employees don’t to open their eyes to signs of trouble, more mistakes will be created.
Celebrating failure is a great alternative to celebrating success. You can make your business even better when you recognise the problems and work towards improvements!
Here’s to teams who celebrate failures!
PS: do you think there is a need for more celebration in your organisation? Here’s what we can do for you.
