Thursday, June 10, 2010

5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work

According to the late Peter Drucker, those who never make mistakes, never do anything interesting. Yet, how many companies look at mistakes in this manner?

I recently found that quote in an interesting article on positivesharing.com entitled, "5 reasons to celebrate mistakes at work." The article challenges our perceptions of mistakes and suggests that without mistakes, there is no innovation.

I believe many companies have a lot to learn about handling employee mistakes. In my experience, mistakes lead to everyone pointing fingers at one another, desperately trying to deflect blame onto someone else.

This kills innovation and productivity. If employees live in fear of making mistakes, do you really think they’ll try anything new or innovative? Do you think your employees will be as productive if they're under pressure to not make a mistake? Of course not.

Once a mistake has been made, no amount of finger pointing can fix it. Instead, a mistake should be regarded as a chance to learn and become better as a company. It’s time to change our reaction to mistakes from “Who’s to blame” to “How can we learn from this?”

1 comments:

Anonymous 12:06 PM  

Our philosophy is 'the only real problem is the one I don't know about'.

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