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犯错之后如何恢复活力

犯错之后如何恢复活力

Eric Breon 2017-01-12
当错误发生后,怎样做出反应,才能改变局面。

领导力内部网络是一个在线社区,商界最具思想和影响力的人物会在这里及时回答关于职业生涯和领导力的问题。今天的问题是:如何在犯下大错后恢复状态?回答者是Vacasa公司的创始人和首席执行官埃里克·布莱恩。

作为一家发展迅速的假期房屋租赁公司的创始人和首席执行官,我犯过许多错误——这是好事。我坚信,如果你不犯错误,就无法创新或颠覆,尽管在损失刚出现时就把目光放得长远并不总是那么简单。

当事情没有按照计划发展时,如果你能够积极有效地做出反应,就可能扭转局势。以下是我的一些建议:

承认错误

为你的错误负责,尽一切努力来改正它。直接一点:“我在XYZ上做错了。我得到了怎样的教训,将如何努力来弥补错误,避免它再次发生。”不要试图推卸责任,承认错误更容易得到同事的尊重。

犯错的好处之一——虽然它似乎不像是好处——就是让你有机会按下暂停键,重新评估形势。在我们的公司里,如果我们忘记了清洁租房,就会借此机会重新评估我们家政系统应用,迅速做出改进。

吸取教训

一旦搞清哪里出问题了,就要问自己如何阻止错误再次发生——或者至少降低错误的发生概率。调整流程能够帮你避免在未来犯下类似的错误,无论是建立重复日程表,避免截止日期太赶,还是定期检查直接汇报,确保员工的目标能够得到评估。

犯错是成长过程中自然会发生的事情,不过要确保你的错误能够让你得到教训,带来有意义的变化,这一点很重要。在我们公司Vacasa的创立初期,会招聘能干积极的员工,并且认为他们可以成长并胜任自己的角色。我们跳过了深入培训的过程,相信我们这些才华横溢的员工会自行解决问题。有时候,我们这种乐观的态度会得到回报,另一些时候,团队成员则无法有效地处理我们的商业需求。

如今,我们对于寻求的核心竞争力有了更好的理解,设立了健全的培训项目来帮助员工取得成功。招聘优秀的人才,让他们放手发挥,在早期是一种可以接受的策略。不过这种方式无法有效地大规模应用。因为我们的发展十分迅速,所以学会了在培训项目上进行更多的投资,从而让员工们能够为客户提供更多他们期待的专业化服务。

在业内积累了七年多的经验,我们发现自己收到的建议往往与过去尝试和失败的想法密切相关。通过回忆那些做得好与不好的地方,我们避免了每隔几年的重复劳动。

速度至上

TripAdvisor的创始人史蒂夫·考费尔告诉我“速度至上”,我和我的团队把它谨记于心。你需要冒些风险,迅速行动来建立成功的公司,有时候你会犯错。多年来,我们有许多次商业扩张遭遇了复杂的局势,浪费了很多时间。但我们知道,过多困扰于那些艰难的经历没有什么好处。挫折不会阻挡我们迅速发展的步伐,我们会从中学习,并且继续前进。

如果你深陷于错误之中而不自拔,就会在尝试新方案时裹足不前。托马斯·爱迪生曾经说过:“我得到了许多结果。我知道有几千种材料不合适。”任何企业或个人都要有这种精神,在犯错之后恢复活力。(财富中文网)

译者:严匡正

The Leadership Insiders network is an online community where the most thoughtful and influential people in business contribute answers to timely questions about careers and leadership. Today’s answer to the question, “How can you bounce back after making a major mistake?” is written by Eric Breon, founder and CEO of Vacasa.

As the founder and CEO of a fast-growing vacation rental company, I’ve made plenty of mistakes—and that’s a good thing. I strongly believe that you can’t innovate and disrupt without making missteps, though it’s not always easy to take that long view when the damage is fresh.

If you react positively and productively when things don’t go as planned, you’ll be able to turn things around. Here’s my advice on how to do so:

Own it

Take responsibility for your mistake and do everything you can to rectify it. Be direct: “I was wrong about XYZ. Here’s what I’ve learned and what I’m doing to fix things and keep it from happening again.” Don’t be tempted to shirk responsibility; your colleagues will respect you more if you own your mistake.

One of the benefits of a mistake—even if it doesn’t feel like a benefit—is that it gives you a chance to press pause and reevaluate. In our case, if we miss a cleaning for one of our rentals, we take that as an opportunity to reevaluate our app-powered housekeeping system and make swift improvements.

Learn your lesson

Once you understand what went wrong, ask yourself how to prevent your mistakes from happening again—or at least make them less likely. Put processes in place that will help you avoid making the same error in the future, whether that’s creating a recurring calendar event so that a deadline doesn’t sneak up on you or checking in with your direct reports at regular intervals to ensure employee targets are being evaluated.

Making mistakes is a natural side effect of growth, but it’s important to ensure that your mistakes teach you something and ultimately lead to meaningful change. In our early days, Vacasa hired competent, motivated people and assumed they would grow into their roles. We skipped in-depth training, confident that our talented recruits would figure things out on the fly. Sometimes we were rewarded for our optimism, but other times we ended up with team members who were unable to execute effectively on our business needs.

Now we better understand what core competencies we’re looking for, and have robust training programs in place to help our staff succeed. Hiring good people and turning them loose was an acceptable strategy early on, but this approach doesn’t scale effectively. Since we’ve grown so rapidly, we’ve learned to invest more in training programs that allow our employees to deliver the specialized services our customers expect.

Having been in business for more than seven years, suggestions are often raised that closely resemble ideas that we’ve tried and have failed in the past. Remembering what we’ve done well and not so well keeps us from having to reinvent the wheel every few years.

Speed wins

TripAdvisor founder Steve Kaufer taught me that “speed wins,” a concept that my team and I take to heart. You have to take some risks to move quickly and build a winning business, and sometimes you’ll make mistakes. Many of our business expansions over the years have been complicated and time-consuming. Yet we know that dwelling too much on those difficult experiences wouldn’t do any good. We haven’t allowed setbacks to hamper our rapid growth; rather, we’ve learned from them and continued to move forward.

If you allow your mistakes to bog you down, you’ll restrict your ability to continue experimenting with new solutions. As Thomas Edison once declared, “I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” This outlook is essential to any company—or individual—dedicated to bouncing back after a mistake.

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