February 28, 2010 – Times LIVE – South Africa
Errors can be great teachers if you avoid the ‘failure’ trap. Regular readers of this column are by now familiar with the phrase, “Failure is only feedback.”
Very often the team and I are called to coach managers and leaders who are somehow missing the plot, making sad and obvious mistakes for a variety of reasons.
Our role is to help them come up with winning strategies to become resilient once again.
To be effective, they need to bounce back and, above all, learn from their mistakes.
Not everyone who is coached is failing. By the way, in coaching we never allow the person to click and drag a specific failure into their identity by saying: “I am a failure.”
We see this all too often when people turn an experience into an identity: “I am a divorcée” or “I am an alcoholic”. The situation is not the person.
Armand Kruger, a master executive business coach, says: “From my modelling and coaching experiences I am becoming more aware of the vital importance of two recurring themes: firstly, ‘contextual intelligence’, that is, the reading of the situation or circumstances and, within the unique demands of the context, making decisions about achieving outcomes against designated standards, and then rolling out the actions ensuring that the outcomes happen; secondly, a ‘balancing act’, that is, given the sensitivity to context, how to balance the priorities of the context and the longer term or bigger picture outcomes and standards.”
The labels “success” and “failure” can sometimes get in the way of useful understanding, because they cause us to feel good or bad, rather than curious. Read story.
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