Mistakes are inevitable. You might as well learn from them.
That’s what Yuchun Lee, Co-Founder and CEO of Allego, holds as a self-described personal mantra.
“If you’re not making a mistake every day, you’re really not growing and learning and improving,” he asserts. “Over time, I start to make fewer and fewer mistakes. [But] I still make mistakes, just in different areas.”
1. Don’t make the same mistake twice.
More than anything, repeating a failed solution indicates there was no lesson learned in the first place. And if one person on the team has gained knowledge and wisdom from learning through failure, shouldn’t everyone benefit?
“I try not to repeat the same mistake twice,” Lee laughs. “We’re trying to help organizations to identify the best storyteller within the organization, bring those messages up front, and make sure everybody knows how to hit their quota, how to onboard people, train them quickly, and launch products correctly.”
2. Stop trying to look good.
Ego can be a huge barrier to success, not just because it may rub people the wrong way, but because it typically doesn’t fool others into believing you truly know it all.
“In my experience, many professionals go to work and spend a lot of energy trying to look good, especially in front of their bosses,” Lee observes. “But guess what? We can see right through it.”
3. Say goodbye to “train, not retain” strategies.
The typical all-up-front onboarding seen in many sales organizations is a thing of the past, according to Lee. It’s what he calls the “train, not retain” strategy.
“You put people through a boot camp, you have some team building going on, and then you pump like a thousand PowerPoints through them and somehow magically expect them to remember anything,” Lee says. “So of course, the same team, two weeks or two months later, they forget everything.”
The best learning occurs in real-time, as problems arise and need to be solved. The problem is, many employees are left to either figure it out on their own…or not. That is where the highest level of new employee turnover occurs, in Lee’s experience.
“Those that don’t figure it out, end up exiting the company. We think that’s a terrible way of ramping and learning,” Lee says. “Think about, if your washing machine’s broken, what do you do? You’re going on YouTube, you try to learn how to fix it. That’s how people work. And in our personal lives, we are all there already. And somehow you go to the corporate world, it feels like you just went back twenty years.”
The solution, Lee says, is to implement training in a way that is integrated into the natural flow of work an employee experiences day-to-day. Make training assets and solutions that can be pulled and utilized in the moment as the standard.
4. Be an organization that truly tolerates mistakes.
The bottom line is, no matter how many or what type of training resources you have, if the team or organization demands perfection, people will revert to the old way of doing things. That means covering up mistakes until they eventually become so large they cannot be ignored.
“I think the key ingredient as a company is to make sure that you truly tolerate mistakes,” Lee advises. “Defending yourselves after a mistake is a waste of energy. Sometimes when you try to cover a mistake is when you start to make a problem even worse. I’ve seen many, many cases where the people who embrace their own mistakes the most are the ones that go the furthest fastest in their careers.”
Instead of reinforcing a culture where mistakes are to be defended or minimized, build a culture of embracing failure early in order to address it head-on.
