The importance of letting others fail

This is you - even if you don't admit it.

Setting up a business is a constant learning process. Your ideas are constantly tested against the reality of the market and real customers. Every day contains a small failure that allows you to learn and improve. Then, just as you think you have things figured out there is a change in the economy or your competitors change the game – so previously successful strategies no longer work.

Given the constant level of change you and your people face it is impossible to avoid any kind of failure.

I can hear you thinking that this is completely obvious and are asking why am I even bothering to talk about this. The reason is simple – many company founders are control freaks, and this means you may well be too.

You mightn’t start out as a control freak, but given the incredible amount of work to be done and the limited time and budget you have to do it you learn the hard way the most efficient way to use your time and the cheapest way to achieve your objectives.

When you take on employees by default you will set high expectations of efficiency and value every minute of their time. Your first few employees may deal with this, but you are setting up a toxic culture that will prevent your company growing and trading successfully.

When everyone is trying to be perfect the risk is that they start watching each other to make sure that nothing goes wrong. I’m sure you’ve experienced this kind of situation before – I sure have, and working on high pressure projects I am guilty of maintaining this exactly kind of culture to achieve project outcomes.

For a long term operation you need normal people who aren’t so stressed out that they can’t perform. It has been proved by researchers such as Dan Ariely that if people are too afraid of the consequences of failure their performance degrades dramatically.

So, expect failure, embrace it, and set up your systems and culture so that failure can be remedied in a common sense manner rather than expecting perfection.

Let them fail and let them learn.