"Leadership in Perspective is an online community where we invite the most thoughtful and influential business people to answer questions about careers and leadership. Today, our question is: What is the best way to keep your company successful? Here is the answer from Tal Schwartz, CEO of ClickTale.
If I were to give one piece of advice to employees, I would want them to understand it thoroughly: to succeed, you must first experience failure. It may sound counterintuitive to advise employees to experience failure before success, but I can assure you that there is definitely something to be said for it. If you want to run a good company, you can tell your team members to strive to be the best they can be. But if you want to run a great company, you have to hold your people to a higher standard. You have to allow them to push their own boundaries, and the only way to do that is to encourage them to experience failure.
That's because you're bound to experience failure when you're chasing truly original ideas. This has been proven countless times throughout history. Moreover, failure is the first step in the birth of creativity. Bill Gates knows this. Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton knew it too. Van Gogh, Dickens and even J.K. Rowling knew that failure is the key to turning a good idea into a fantastic one.
So not only do I encourage my staff to experience failure, I ask them to do so. every employee at ClickTale knows that at brainstorming sessions, company meetings and strategy events, they can come up with any idea that crosses their mind. The ideas they come up with to overhaul the customer experience can be crazy and far-fetched, but they know that if the company agrees to put them into action, they will face no penalty even if they ultimately fail. This is because I believe in the 1:4 rule, which means that for every employee who truly drives themselves to think creatively, they will experience at least one failure for every four successes they experience. Conversely, if they succeed every time, it becomes necessary for leaders to take a serious look at their performance.
So how do we create a reassuring environment where employees can be open to failure? Frankly, you can create that environment any way you like. At ClickTale, we prefer the traditional approach of not being shy about praise. Recognise an employee's failed attempt at a company meeting, highlighting the courage, creative thinking and drive they showed in coming up with the idea and in trying it out. You can also take a more basic approach, such as offering financial rewards, sweet treats, or a combination of positives that fit with your company's unique corporate culture. The way you reward is not important in itself. What matters is creating the right environment that really pushes employees to push themselves and go further.
In today's ultra-competitive marketplace, true innovation is very scarce. Employees are eager to express themselves and worried about keeping their jobs, so they need the right encouragement from their supervisors so that they can feel comfortable thinking outside the box. If you want to be truly successful, you must take the initiative to create such a 'safety net' and encourage and reward failure. Because it is only by giving your employees the peace of mind to experience failure that you can break free and achieve real success.