August Blog: Workforce Connector

Failures

In the workplace, when an employee or the company as a whole is working towards a goal, failure is an essential part of the process. Failure occurs when a goal isn’t achieved or a step to overcome a challenge isn’t overcome. While failure is never enjoyable, it’s also an essential part of the process.

When a workforce member is working towards a career goal or a whole company is striving for success, failure helps make sure the correct steps are being taken and teaches more lessons that have to be learned in order to move forward. Each failure can be used to assess what went wrong and why things happened in the first place. After the failure is examined, and lessons from the failure are taught, the employee and or the whole company will be more prepared to work towards their goal the next time around.

When an employee or the whole workforce gets discouraged about their failure, the workforce leadership team needs to step in. The leadership team can help their workforce team as a whole and as individuals push through failure. When failure occurs in both cases, the leadership team can take the time to help their workforce understand that failure is an opportunity to reassess their situation and figure out what lessons need to be learned in order to succeed. If the leadership team works alongside the workforce team, both teams will feel the impact of failure which will help them both learn valuable lessons. If the leadership team mentors individual employees, the employee will be able to ask questions and get support when failure occurs.

 CEO of Tesla and SpaceX Elon Musk says,

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”