Help Your Employees Fail Cheaply

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, projects and tasks due fail, and employees in charge of them fail. If we were all perfect in everything we do, we’d all be incredibly wealthy. As a manager, you must understand how much responsibility to give an employee and how to help an employee handle when projects due fail.

We’re going to explore how to help your employees fail cheaply and how to recover from a failure.

1. Give Your Employees Small Projects

The first step in building the experience of your employees is to assign them small projects. Small projects help build confidence, and if the employee fails, he fails cheaply. Your goal is to reduce your failure rate to almost zero. As your employees become more familiar with how to overcome problems on a project and gain the confidence of several small wins, you can assign them larger projects and the likelihood these projects will succeed increases.

2. More Communication = Better Project Success Rates

Many projects or tasks fail due to a lack of communication. Sufficient communications allows you, as the manager, to understand status and identify problems before they become much larger issues. I recently managed an office move project and one of the staff members managing the furniture moving vendor kept telling me everything was fine and on schedule. I asked some probing questions and discovered several conflicts with the movers and the date we selected. The employee initially thought it was a small problem, but as she got deeper and deeper into it, she found it to be a much larger issue but was afraid to tell me this far in. I made a few phone calls with her and resolved the problem.

Make sure you let your employees know that you want to know successes and failure, ideas and problems, and that you will work together with them to resolve the issues. Ask for regular status updates and hold people accountable when they don’t communicate well.

3. Know When to Ask for Help

In the office move project, my employee should have asked for help much sooner, but she was afraid of the consequences because she let it go on too long. One of the key things you need to teach your employee is how to know when the tide has shifted and she needs help. This is a judgment call for each employee, and unfortunately, the more experience you have the easier it is to know you need help. Unfortunately, when you have the least experience is when its more likely you will need help. Teaching your employees to know when to ask for help will keep failures at a minimum and keep them cheap!

4. Make Decisions More Quickly

When you do have a project or task that is on the path to failure, you need (as a manager) to know when it’s time to pull the plug. You will need to learn the art of making decisions quickly and correctly. This will take some time for you to develop this skill. Once you have mastered the art of figuring out when a project is on the path to failure and knowing when to pull the plug, you will help your employees fail cheaply.

5. Learn From Mistakes

If the project does fail, take an opportunity to learn from the mistakes you and your team made. Could it have been avoided? Is there more you could do? Should you have pulled the plug sooner? Learning from mistakes and teaching your employees that you can learn from mistakes will help you fail much more cheaply the next time.

We all experience failures in life, it’s how we handle those failures and what we learn from them that makes the difference. If you can instill the confidence in your employees to take on new things and not be afraid of failure, you will find that your failures will be cheap and your successes great!