I heard a great quote recently –
Wise is the one who learns from others’ mistakes. Less wise is the one who learns from his own mistakes. The fool keeps making the same mistakes again and again and never learns from them.
Sounds great, isn’t it? But how many of us would try to follow it sincerely enough? Let me take the organizational context here.
Do you accept mistakes of your colleagues, your teammates, the people you manage?
Do you yourself try to learn from their mistakes, try to discover that you might have been in the same soup sometime?
Do you encourage discussing mistakes openly, even going to the extent of organizing sessions/meetings to discuss what mistakes a person committed and what did he learn from them?
Does your organization’s culture rewards risks and encourage innovation? If yes, then they can’t do that unless they allow and embrace mistakes of their employees.
Accepting mistakes involve awareness, efforts, patience, right attitude, an open mind and a vision. So, discuss and not discourage mistakes.