Feeling Failure...Making Room For Growth

White broken lightbulb.

If you feel that something no longer works, fits, or functions optimally, you stop to fix it, right? Organizational leaders are just people, like you and me. If they don’t feel that anything in the organization is out of whack, they just keep pressing on, right? So when things don’t feel right to us, down in the organization, why do we scrape and scramble to bodily stretch ourselves to compensate and cover that gap? Many organizations have become entities held together by the human version of “spit and chewing gum”—they’ve become a mass of workarounds and apologies.

Out of the goodness of our hearts, our desire to please, our compassion for our colleagues, and our belief in our organization’s mission, we close the gaps, fill in the voids, cover the mistakes, and trap the elephant in the room. We never let our organizations feel that something is wrong, when it seriously is. This is not only the underbelly of organizations of which I write, but I the norm in organizational life today. But there is truly nothing normal about it and many organizations have learned that the hard way.

In my transformation adventure, I’ve discovered that all of the tools, techniques, data, and dialogue, won’t solve anything if the underlying problem isn’t owned…systemically…by all. These aren’t “spot” problems. This is a cultural pandemic that requires vaccination and new behavioral protocols. We know it can be done. Why don’t we and why haven’t we is what I write to reveal. Let’s let the light back in and put our organizational communities back together in a real and meaningful way. Let’s grow together, by making a learning culture. Let’s embrace the human side of change by feeling failure and learning from it.