Your Daily Focus: Training
The best time to give responsibility to someone is after they fail.
Tom Watson was the founder of IBM. One of his top junior executives once spent $12 million of the company’s money on a project that failed miserably. Shortly thereafter the young executive appeared in Watson’s office and plunked a resignation letter on the boss’s desk.
“What’s this?” asked Watson
“My resignation,” said the demoralized young man. “I thought I’d save you the trouble of firing me.”
“I don’t want your resignation,” Watson snorted gruffly, but grinning all the same. “I just invested $12 million in your education! Why would I want to get rid of you now? Get back to work!”
Use failure as a learning experience, a launching pad for success. It is a simple shift of a thought to see failure from the positive. Instead of kicking a player when he’s down, or worse, firing him, find ways to empower him and get him back into the game. Your confidence in him will have a much more dramatic impact at that time then at any other.
Use the opportunity of failure for confidence-building for others… and yourself!
I so agree with this concept. I think the biggest lesson is that he took the risk and nothing is ever accomplished if you don’t take a risk. Great story, great lesson, and yes I would have kept him on my team.
Have a blessed day
Jolly stickley
Get lesson for today! No one is perfect and we will all make, what looks like, “wrong” decisions. It is what you do after the fact that determines the ultimate outcome. I have “failed” many, many times over the years. Through my failures I somehow have the most amazing life I could have ever dreamed. If I would have let all of those failures keep me down, my life would look completely different. Thank you, as always, for the very timely messages that reinforce the purpose for my life.
Kevin
Personally I have found that it’s hard to determine what failure really is. Is it when I give up and stop trying? Is it when I view the past with disappointment and regret? Or even maybe when enough consequences bore down that I was then forced to do something differently when I didn’t want to? As I grow more in an attitude of appreciation, acceptance and awareness, I am finding that failures and successes are both just labels I place on what happens – a matter of personal judgment from my limited perspective. As long as I am alive, life happens. Things happen. I don’t have to label them; I can just let them be. It is really all wonderfully amazing and radically diverse!
This lesson comes at a time where it’s message has been brought into my life several times over the last few weeks. We have all heard that in order to succeed, you invariably will fail along the way and that anyone who has accopmpished greatness has failed many times. I have even heard others saying they want the failures to happen so they can get them out of the way and succeed! A great lesson and thank you for reminding me that failures are just a way of learning!
Mike Ball