Take advantage of failure
Any sports fan can recall the phrases used when his or her team loses the big game: ‘Losing builds character,’ ‘They gave it their best shot,’ and, ‘We’ll get ’em next time.’
But the fact is that in business, losing or failing is often a step that must be taken to move ahead and find success, especially when implementing change.
“Whenever I’m talking or looking for a new position or interviewing, I like to find out what their biggest failure was,” Reeg says. “If someone doesn’t succeed in delivering something, but they were trying to do something that was really out of the box, I understand that.
“What I think you want to find out is, did they learn from that and are they able to now parlay that into other situations where they can really drive change and understand what can cause change to fail? That experience in having something not go right is really valuable.”
As Reeg launched his effort to develop a new transaction-processing platform at MasterCard, he was keenly aware of the past failures. If this project was going to work, his people needed to know what had not worked in the past.
“It’s establishing right upfront a tenet that every issue is thrown out on the table, no matter how painful,” Reeg says. “You can’t have an activity the magnitude and size of this effort and not assume there aren’t going to be problems along the way. You have to have a good problem resolution process built into the framework. You have to make it OK for people to raise issues.”
Your approach to the discussion of past mistakes and how to learn from them is crucial. Talk about mistakes you personally have made and how you responded to them.
“When I can talk about things that didn’t go right that I was leading, it makes it much easier for a project leader to talk to me about something that’s not going right for them now,” Reeg says. “You have to humanize that and bring it from a personal standpoint.”
It’s the idea of remembering what happened, but always continuing to push forward that will get you through and help you when the inevitable new mistakes are made.
“The first thing we always try to get focused on is, ‘Let’s get the problem fixed,’” Reeg says. “Then, assuming it had enough importance, we always do a lessons learned afterward. It’s not a lessons learned to find out who is guilty. It’s a lessons learned to say, ‘Here’s a process we put in place to make sure we never have to go through this again.’ Keep people focused on fixing the problem first, lessons learned second and what do we put in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”