Mistakes and failures are great opportunities to teach and connect. If you’re not making mistakes you’re either disengaged and merely going through the motions or you’re not doing anything very interesting. Either one is a soul-crusher, a company-crusher, an engagement crusher.
In my book, Recognize THEM: 52 Ways to Recognize Your Employees in Ways They Value, I discuss how I failed ... once, maybe twice, in learning each of these ways. Those lessons taught me humility and patience and forgiveness. I saw how sharing those stories helped us laugh, learn and trust each other. That trust allowed us to engage, offer opinions, offer arguments, find solutions, go one step more every day, make more mistakes and learn more and learn it faster.
As their leader you lead by example. Nothing sets a direct report at ease like sharing one of your failures and what you learned from it.
Nothing says an employee trusts you like they’re coming to you with a mistake.
Yes, it’s tough. Practice makes perfect. Practicing how you handle a mistake, turning it into an opportunity to learn and grow or ... or not.
An earlier step called for you to add it to your calendar. Getting comfortable with sharing mistakes and learning from them is so important you should consider adding it to your calendar.
- What mistakes have I made?
- What happened?
- What did I learn?
It’s painful but illuminating. Yes, practice makes, well not perfect but more aware and more comfortable that mistakes are part of our day, each one is its own lesson, and sharing them builds bonds of trust and communication that open doors to greater participation by everyone.
Here's the previous steps to jumpstart your employee engagement.
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