Could Mistakes Be The Most Valuable Part Of Growing Your Business?

Part of growing is scaling. Part of scaling is hiring people.

And part of hiring people is that they will make mistakes.

When you are new to hiring, it may feel like the reason team members are making mistakes is that you are no longer doing it perfectly yourself. That because you can’t oversee every aspect, it will never be done “just right.”

And you’re right. At least about not being able to oversee it all.

A natural side-effect of scaling a business is forced perfectionism detachment. Said differently: it is impossible to scale and be a perfectionist.

Letting go and embracing imperfection is central feature of business growth. If you are in the process of hiring and you are freaking out when your new hires making mistakes, you’re experiencing the natural growing pains of building your first team.

You are no longer a solo operator. You’re graduating to setting up a machine as best you can so that it in whole, or in part, can run without you. You literally can’t, by yourself, be every single piece. You need other cogs and bands and bits to create something that runs to create a bigger impact than you ever could alone.

But it’s not like you create the machine and let is run wild. You as the leader of your business still have the vital role of creating a culture that helps propel your business even further forward.

Here’s What To Do:

• First and foremost, expect mistakes to happen.
• Secondly, create the right culture for leveraging the inevitable mistakes so that mistakes become assets instead of losses

Creating A Culture Of Communication, Learning, And Changing For The Better

Culture of communication

Team members should always be encouraged to speak up when they make a mistake.

Could communication be rewarded? Are there behaviors of your own that you need to change in response to mistakes being brought up? How are your managers reacting to their reports when they bring up mistakes they’ve made?

Culture of learning

Everyone on the team should be invited to help analyze why the mistake occurred.

What are team members individually and collectively able to learn from the mistakes that they all communicate about? Do they understand what went wrong and why? What ideas do they have for not repeating the mistake?

Culture of changing for the better

Through open communication and learning, teams can implement changes.

Teams can improve their own systems continuously, again and again in a near constant cycle of growth.

Turn Mistakes Into A Force For Improvement

The constant iteration of this cycle: communication, learning, changing always starts with problems. It starts with imperfection. It starts with messing up so that the learning and changing can occur.

What would it take to believe that mistakes are a valuable part of improving your business? What would it take to instill the value of mistakes into your team’s culture?

Mistakes will happen. Are you setting your business up to improve through them?