By: Maurice Gilbert, Managing Partner of Conselium Executive Search
What do you call a Major League Baseball player with a .300 batting average? A multi-millionaire…that’s right, for every 10 times at the plate he gets only three hits.
Let’s process this in the business world. Do you as a leader step up to the plate and try new ideas to grow your business? Do you fail enough in your attempts to get your share of victories/success? Do you encourage your staff to do the same? Point being: in order to grow as a professional, you must try new things. When your attempts don’t bring the outcome you were looking for, are you a failure? Of course not; you just failed in your attempt. Big difference. If you’re receptive, you realize that having failed at something just provides feedback so you can listen and make adjustments to try again. This concept is applicable to every successful company, sports franchise and individual.
As a leader, you personally need to embrace failure as feedback and educate your staff to do the same. The alternative is not trying to implement new products, new services or new procedures. This would result in stagnation of your business and perhaps a threat to its ongoing sustainability. As the great hockey star Wayne Gretzky stated, “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take.” So what are you waiting for? Go out and fail and fail frequently…it brings you that much closer to having your share of successes.
Maurice Gilbert is Managing Partner of Conselium Executive Search, which specializes in placing Compliance Officers and Legal Counsel for clients in the U.S., Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Maurice is also CEO of Corporate Compliance Insights, a worldwide publication devoted to governance, risk and compliance issues. Maurice can be reached at maurice@conselium.com or maurice@corporatecomplianceinsights.com.
