Organizations whose cultures forbid failure are organizations that will become stagnant, lacking the resourcefulness and innovation necessary to succeed.

When failure isn’t an option, there’s no incentive to take even the smallest risk in trying something new.  If an employee knows he’ll be punished for failing, he’ll be careful to stay well within the boundaries of accepted practice.  And then it’s not just failure that isn’t an option; it’s any kind of change or improvement.

Obviously you don’t want to encourage wildly impractical risk-taking or invite catastrophic failure.  So how can you encourage employees to take sensible risks, learn from their mistakes, and – as the saying goes – “fail forward” into success? (more…)

We tend to focus on diversity as an issue of workplace relationships.

It’s much more than that.

When we limit our focus to whether or not people are “playing nicely” together, the idea of diversity can take on a lot of destructive baggage.  We can even begin thinking that it would be easier if we had a less diverse workforce.  After all, if everyone were more alike, we wouldn’t have to deal with these issues – right?

Maybe, and maybe not. (more…)

Problems, Problems, Problems – Wouldn’t life be grand if we never had any problems. Everything would work perfectly, everyone would always get along and be happy, everything would be wonderful for everyone everywhere, and things would only get better as we live happily ever after.

Unfortunately, in the real world there is no avoiding the grim realities of the dark side. Viewed from a business perspective – take the number of problems of each person, multiply by the number of employees, multiply the result by every single aspect of doing business, and the final result is what keeps every business owner chewing their fingernails down to the bone. (more…)