Celebrate success, admit mistakes, learn from both

I’ll be honest, I’ve had to ask people around me to remind me to celebrate success more often. It is a tough thing for me sometimes because in business, I EXPECT to be successful and those in the organization around me to also be successful. Because of my expectations, I sometimes forget to provide short celebrations for success. It can be as simple as a lunch for the whole organization, or a small plaque commemorating a milestone, or simply a town hall meeting where you thank everyone who had a hand in the success and ask for the whole company to applaud their efforts. The celebration doesn’t always need to be big or extravagant, it is the act of celebration that is most important. But don’t forget to give something big away sometimes!

I’ve told people many times that mistakes are just part of the business world “tuition”. I have much more tolerance for “honest mistakes” over those that people make because of them simply being reckless. In any case my advice to people who make a mistake is very simple. Don’t ever, ever try to hide or cover up a mistake. That will always make the ramifications of the mistake get amplified – Always. If you admit a mistake and bring it to me or the management team, it becomes the team’s responsibility to help correct it. And we will help correct it.

When someone comes to me admitting they made a mistake, I ask them two things: What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do to make sure you don’t do it again? Then I offer help to address how to create a solution to the problem, but I almost always include that same person in providing the solution. It helps build confidence and it also helps them see things differently so they can be better prepared and avoid similar issues in the future.

At the end of big projects I like for our teams to put together a “lessons learned” document. It doesn’t have to be long or complicated, but just highlight the key things that went right and we want to be sure to duplicate, but also mistakes that were made that we would like to avoid. Then this document needs to be circulated and made part of training materials to help the organization continue to improve. It is important to find a way to systematize such learnings – otherwise the knowledge will reside in specific employees heads only (some call it Tribal Knowledge), but if this knowledge cannot be documented and shared, the learnings will be lost when that employee retires or goes to another company.