When a child starts to walk or draws a picture good parents reward their efforts with praise and encouragement. The same applies when they speak their first words or sing their first song. More praise is heaped upon. This despite the fact that when taking their first steps they will fall, their first attempts at drawing will be rubbish, their first words will be basic and not necessarily coherent and their fist song will be out of tune. In children we praise the effort hoping that repetitive failure will lead to success, but as soon as we become adults all that changes. Failure is seen as poor performance, and effort only rewarded if results are seen. However, effective leaders reward the right things.
Effective leaders reward failure if the failure was for the right reasons and can be seen as a step on the road to success. We try something new and it doesn’t work, launch a new product or service and it fails. So long as failure has been considered and accepted in advance then the effort should be rewarded. Ineffective leaders reward the status quo. Effort counts for nothing, only results. Failure is just that, failure. It is not seen as a step along the road.
If parents worked on the same basis their reaction to their child standing up and falling should be “well that didn’t work did it? Stop wasting time trying to walk when you know crawling works perfectly well.”
That’s why organisations with ineffective leaders get left behind. They stop at the first fall and go back to what they are currently doing knowing that it works. By not rewarding and indeed actively punishing and discouraging effort unless the results can be seen in advance they plough the safe furrow. They won’t release a new product or service without comprehensive and quantifiable market research. They insist on always striving for the “faster horse” as it’s the safe route. All this despite the fact that we have known right back to the days of Henry Ford that faster horses are not effective. Please see my blog on the subject. Faster Horses Are Not Effective
In a commencement speech at Stanford Google CEO Sundar Pichai said “reward efforts, not outcomes” and we can learn a lot from that.
In the environment in which we find ourselves today we must reward risk and that means accepting justifiable failure. Effective leaders reward the right things. Unfortunately most leaders are actually followers.
Which one are you?
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