Celebrate Your Mistakes
Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes – Oscar Wilde.
Looking back on my career I often think about the accumulation of my experience which, from time to time, included some interesting wrong turns…also known as mistakes. Early on they frustrated me but also drove me to do better. After many years I realized that mistakes were inevitable and actually part of what made me better as they were a natural part of the learning experience.
In my initial years as an accountant and then a CPA, they helped me understand the basics of accounting, auditing, working in teams and how to communicate effectively with clients. Later as I entered the corporate world of finance my occasional miss-steps helped me learn how to steer my way through the politics. When I began to manage people my blunders taught me how to maneuver through the complexities of mentoring, training and more importantly dealing with difficult situations and people. I still drove myself and my Department to achieve perfection but at the same time preached that mistakes were how we learn.
There was a time I even decided to have fun with our mistakes and hung a rubber chicken above the cubical of any staff that had made an error. Not to punish but to try to lighten the stress of our 12 hour days, nights and weekends. Ironically that was an error in judgment by my part since not all of the staff were ready to so publically celebrate their errors. So there you go…a lesson was learned. So I learned from it and moved on. The rubber chicken returned to my office to live out his life of luxury.
We learn from our mistakes. This seems obvious and everyone knows this so why even talk about it? Because under the stress of our day-to-day lives what is obvious can be forgotten and sometimes we need to be reminded.
•Put processes and procedures in place to catch the errors that matter •Depending on the experience of staff additional checks and balances may need to be put in place •Always keep in perspective what is critical and don’t sweat the small stuff •The risk of error to a Public company is different than to a private one
And most importantly there is a different between errors that are part of the learning process and being error prone. Individuals that continuously make the same mistakes over and over again are not learning and you may need to re-think how they fit into your organization.
Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out – Benjamin Franklin.
