Why Failing Just Might Be The Best Thing To Ever Happen To An IT Manager

Every failure is simply a chance to start again with more information
Every failure is simply a chance to start again with more information
Image Credit: Behrooz Nobakht

Failure is bad, right? I mean, as IT leaders, we try to spend every day using our IT manager skills to find ways to allow our team to accomplish more – to be successful, not a failure. However, the harsh reality of life is that yes, sometimes we do fail. Does this mean that it’s “game over” for us? Interestingly enough, no – in fact failing might be just exactly what we need do in order to become a success.

Just Exactly What Is A Failure?

Perhaps we should start our discussion by taking a look at just exactly what a failure is. I think that in our minds, we view failure as being a bad thing that our teams need to avoid at all costs. However, it can be just a bit too easy to forget just exactly what failure looks like as we start to try to avoid anything that we think might look just a little bit like failure.

I define failure as being when either we as IT manager or our IT teams (or perhaps both of us together) are not able to achieve something that we were trying to accomplish. It really is as simple as that. If you can accept my definition of failure, then you just might start to realize that all of us fail a lot more often than we might normally think that we do.

However, if we are failing all of the time, then that means that all of the other IT teams at our company are probably also spending a considerable amount of their time failing also. This poses a bit of a dilemma, if we are all wallowing in failure as much as our definition would lead us to believe, then how can we ever possible hope to have our IT teams become a success?

How Can You Make Failure A Good Thing?

If we can’t stop our IT teams from failing, then we probably should look into seeing if it might be possible to find a way to transform our failures into something more positive. The good news is that this actually is possible. We just need a few suggestions on how best to go about doing this.

The first thing that you need to realize as an IT manager is that your IT team knows when it has failed. They fully understand when they were trying to achieve something and the team fell short. Nobody feels good when this happens and if you don’t do something, then it’s going to cause problems. You need to create a forum for your team where they can come and confess when they have failed. This has to be a nurturing, supportive environment where everyone can come together and where everyone feels comfortable standing up and telling everyone what they did that didn’t work out so well.

The ability to come to grips with our failures is a critical first step for your team. The ability to share a failure with your peers allows you to get it off of your shoulders. When you hear about their failures you start to understand that you are not alone in not always being able to achieve everything that you wanted to do. This is a critical part of understanding what went wrong. By sharing your failure you’ll be able to get the support of the rest of the team and they’ll know to step in the next time you are struggling with a similar problem. They’ll want you to succeed and this means that your chances of being successful next time are a lot higher.

What Does All Of This Mean For You?

As an IT manager, your job is to find ways to get your team to help the company move forward and become more profitable. As hard as you try, not all of your team’s activities will always result in success. In fact, sometimes you’ll probably fail. However, what you need to realize is that this is a part of life – failure is what opens the door to future successes.

We need to understand just exactly what a failure is. It is simply not being able to achieve something that we were trying to accomplish. The fact that we failed does not mean that we can’t do it; rather, it means that the way that we tried to do it was the wrong way. In the spirit of IT team building what you need to do as an IT manager is to set up an environment where your team members will feel comfortable confessing to their failures. By doing this they’ll be getting rid of negative feelings and sharing their experiences with the rest of the team.

Failures happen. You need to use your IT manager training to find ways to turn these events into something that is going to help your team to improve. Giving your team the confidence to admit to their failures and to share them with the rest of the team is a great way to help the team to move forward. Give this a try and see if you can change the team’s failures into a very special kind of success.

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that any kind of failure is just all bad?

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental IT Leader Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental IT Leader Newsletter are now available. Learn what you need to know to do the job. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Come on, admit it – you’ve told your IT team that you have an “open door” policy. What you meant by this is that you wanted each and every member of your team to feel comfortable dropping by at any time to discuss any issue with you. It could have something to do with staffing, the team’s strategy, or even how you are managing the team. Great concept – in fact it’s one of the IT manager skills that we are all taught. However, how many times has someone taken you up on this offer?