The goal of a POC is to run a series of tests where we actively try to validate our thinking. The key in these tests is that we fail forward and continuously learn from the results of the test. Encouraging people to feel comfortable with failure reflects both the concept of a POC, but also the real world, and how our attitude towards hard learnings shapes the success of the next challenge. These learnings will always be carried forward to the next project or personal challenge that will need to be overcome.
So, if failing is a viable practice, why are employees today often still made to feel as though failure is unacceptable? Lack of freedom to fail is causing anxiety, stress and churn of talent when in reality failing is the fastest way to learn.
Encourage leaders to understand the difference between failing through negligence and lack of care, versus failing at proving a concept and or an idea. If negligence, clear guidance needs to be given on why this needs to be avoided. If failing from testing an idea, failure should be considered learnings, therefore value for the organisation.
As Malcolm Forbes put it “Failure is success if we learn from it.”
Consistency breeds habit, habit breeds consistency.
Success, and success in leadership particularly, doesn’t come overnight. Real success is a result of a culmination of small consistent behaviours and the ability to get numerous small things right every day.
Consistency can manifest itself in many ways, one of which is by habit. Being able to break your daily ‘to dos’ up into micro instances of daily ritual allows (over time) a consistent approach to the task, and therefore predictable results that reflect this consistency. Years ago, when I started in the corporate world, one of my manager mentors described the approach of doing one great thing a day (regardless of size or importance). Over a week, that’s seven great new things. Over a month that’s thirty-one optimised ways of approaching a topic/task. This process automatically begins to build muscle memory towards positive habit, which promotes consistency.
It’s the consistent delivery of small things that add up to a grand prize.
So, in the workplace, if leaders consistently deliver things such as empathy, understanding, time, education, encouragement and support to their workforce every day, you can almost guarantee a more consistently happy, thriving, highly functioning team who will work more effectively and stay with the organisation longer.
Empathy is the ability to understand how people are feeling and the ability to relate and connect to them in a way which inspires positive action or behaviour – regardless of rank, social standing, or their relation to you. Effective practitioners of empathy can look beyond their personal feelings and views to place themselves in the shoes of another person.
Effective leaders wear many empathetic ‘shoes’ and can quickly place themselves in others’ situations. During a leader’s career, they have two large segments (or shoes) to fill, one of the team, and one of the customer. They know one is symbiotic to the other. Understanding your team and communicating in a way that will resonate with them to help deliver more effectively and with authentic purpose, and secondly understanding your customer to deliver what they need and want, when they want it.
Even though the future of business will look so different from our current reality, leadership principles will remain, and tomorrow’s leaders need to learn from their predecessors’ mistakes so that they can go on to make their own.
Curtis Schmidt, a globally acclimatized marketing operator recently joined RAPP MENA as President and Chief Growth Officer. The RAPP MENA team helps invent the future of marketing and works with growth-focused brands that want to invest in a new future that is accelerated with data, transformed by technology and elevated through creativity. Having worked both client and agency side, often in the space of business transformation and acceleration, a reoccurring disparity continues to rear its head around what businesses are able to deliver within its day-to-day operations, and the conceptual vision signed off by the executive management team.
LEADERSHIP
31 | BIZPRENEUR MIDDLE EAST May 2021