Why the Successful Celebrate Failure

We all know that everyone makes mistakes. In fact, our humanistic nature absolutely guarantees that we will all fail at one thing or another during our lifetime; most likely, many things.

In its September 2004 Special Einstein Edition, Discover magazine pointed out that even Albert Einstein made mistakes – big ones. And yet, many of those mistakes led to a tremendous number of future successes for which we are all grateful today.

As a business leader, I suspect you make time to celebrate the big successes of your team. What about the smaller successes, and even the failures?

Multiple studies and best-selling books, such as Heath’s Celebrating Failure, tout the positive impact of mistakes. From continuous improvement of a product or service to the innovative creation of others, small successes AND mistakes are more often than not serve as catalysts to forward progress. After all, you know what won’t work as a result of the mistake; don’t you? Or, do you just brush off the mistake and put it down to the incompetence of the person/people who made it?

In their book TheLeadership Challenge, Kouzes & Posner point out that effective leaders not only encourage mistakes, but celebrate them by getting personally involved as well. What better way to lead, than to get in the trenches with your team? By sharing the experiences of their challenges, and celebrating both successes and failures, you can reinforce the team’s courage to continually drive innovation, while building on the strengths of an open, collaborative corporate culture.

With Thanksgiving just around the corner, what will you celebrate this week?

Before founding her own consulting firm, Dawn Gannon served as a respected management professional in the nonprofit military, higher education, and healthcare fields for 25 years. Dawn’s commitment and personal mission to improve the lives of others through service to the community focuses on providing administrative and volunteer management, consumer education, public outreach, event planning, relationship-building efforts, and strategic planning. She is also a published author on the topic of childfree living.