Main Idea:
Are you conservative by nature? When was the last time you took a chance? Are you afraid of making mistakes? Is your team afraid of making mistakes? Are all mistakes equal? Do you applaud when someone tries something new and fails?
Expansion of the Idea:
For the last couple of weeks, there have been some good soccer matches on television. Some of the games have been part of the Copa America tournament which is the tournament for South America. The games have been fascinating even if I don’t know any of the players on the teams. It is great to watch a sport where athletes are using their gifts and playing at an extremely high level. The other night Brazil played Columbia in Brazil. The experts were all predicting a Brazil blow out. And then a weird thing happened. Columbia scored 10 minutes into the match on an unbelievable play. (If you like soccer, find the video clip online. It is good.)
All of a sudden, Columbia is winning and Brazil is playing from behind which just doesn’t happen. Brazil started to put pressure on Columbia who played tremendous defense. The problem was that they didn’t even pretend to try to control the ball or attack. Whenever they got the ball, they just cleared it to the other end of the field and went back on defense. They were able to play like this for 70 minutes which is remarkable. But the inevitable happened. Brazil scored and tied it up. And with about 1 minute left in the game, Brazil scored the game winner. And Columbia went home with a loss.
You may or may not care about soccer. But the principles of pressure and defense apply to all of our small businesses. Columbia played not to lose and as a result they lost. All of us know this but we do it anyway. We don’t take a chance on a new product or service. We fail to trust an employee with a critical new project. We don’t want to offend a key customer even though it might cost us a key employee. We are afraid of switching vendors even though lead times and quality have been deteriorating? There are a number of situations where we play not to lose instead of playing to win.
The key thing with mistakes is what kind of mistake it is. If it is a mistake trying something new or looking into a new product, that is acceptable. If it is a mistake of failing to backup the computer system, that isn’t. Mistakes of aggressively trying to win are the types of mistakes we are looking for. We want to put safeguards in where we can but we have to try new things. As the legendary coach of UCLA John Wooden said,
“The man who is afraid to risk failure seldom has to face success.”
If you are not achieving the success you would like, then maybe you have been working not to lose.
Questions to Consider:
What have you failed at recently? What did you learn from it?
Have you punished people for making mistakes?
Have you rewarded failure when people are trying something new?
Is fear of failure embedded in your culture?
Or, do team members like to try new things?