The Importance of Making Mistakes

An expert, is an individual who has made all of the mistakes that can be made and has learned from them.

It’s a fact of life that most people fail when attempting to do something for the first time. In business, you will often find your team members not doing things correctly at first. The process of making mistakes is natural, your team will make mistakes and if you are to be an effective manager and great leader, you will let them make those mistakes.

Making mistakes simply means you are learning faster.

-Weston H. Agor, Intuitive Management

When teaching and working with little children, parents will often find themselves hovering over the child as they attempt to perform a specific task. Why does the parent hover? Because they know that the child will most likely fail in their initial attempts at a task and as the parent, they will need to step in and help the child work through the task until they become successful at it. As a manager, you will also need to have your own form of “hovering” over your team because:

• The employee will make a mistake.
• The manager will need to fix the mistake.
• The process of making the mistake is important because it’s through mistakes that the employee learns how the task should not be done. But this is learned only by getting the mistakes out the of the way.

The key to learning from mistakes is having someone there who is able to step in and offer positive encouragement for the attempt made, then point out suggestions for how the mistake can be avoided in the future.

Training and coaching your employees is best utilized when:

• In real world situations where the individual is given the opportunity to work on a task as best they can.
• When the individual reaches their mistake point, the manager can step in and help coach them through the solution of the problem.
• The individual then should be encouraged to analyze what happened in their attempt, what went wrong, and how they can come to the same solution that was demonstrated to them.