Tips for Insurance Agents

Learning From Failure

Introduction: it is mostly found in the society that candidates draft their success resume and submit and circulate them and even post them to identify potential employers and achieve gainful employment by alluring the recruiters through the glitz and shine of their achievements, capabilities, leadership, success stories and others. But in reality one has to taste and feel the bitterness of failures too, which we fail to mention or avoid a careful mention of them because we think that readdressing the failure may give a bad omen and shall tar our image in the eye of the person who may be assessing us if we share our failures with them.

This is the general reason why we shy away from sharing our failed adventures and initiatives which in actually might have helped us derive
New strategies which in effect have had helped us learn and wade through the rough wasters by gaining insight more fruitfully achieved by the failures rather than successes that have came our way to teach us and make us rich by experience, this is the reason behind acknowledging and sharing failure so that we learn from the mistakes and change our attitude and strategies more carefully and analytically without compromising our creative ability to seek opportunity in the face of difficulty.

What is failure: One may easily define failure as non fulfillment or non achievement of goals and targets, people often chase their benchmarks and if they fail to achieve them then call the phenomenon as failure, some failure arise not out of individual attempts being non perfect, but some cause of failure are beyond a mans control and capacity, for example failure of crop due to scant rain or external environment being unfriendly may ruin the farmers plan even though he had tilled the soil and kept his ranch ready. Then there are other failures that arise out of ineffective strategy, poor planning, weak networking and myopic analyzing of potential problems can also lead to failure and disaster, disaster management has then evolved as a distinct faculty of learning, but the biggest failure is to not to learn from the failure and repeat them at a heavy cost, for e.g. a student ignoring his syllabus even after failing in the examination attempt and not doing any corrective action over the failed attempt.
Failure is often mentioned and defined in negativity to success, failure has a negative definition but actually a failed attempt teaches how the further attempts should take care the course, failure is a guide and sign post that directs us to take the right turns on the goose bumps and swirl, curl and curves through the cross country of hectic benchmarks. Failure may arise even when enough investment of effort has been made. One should apply his cognitive thinking which is the crest jewel of analytical thinking and impartially judge himself if he really wants to derive positive result of correctly dissecting the failure. This analysis shall serve as the real benefit arising from the investments done in attempts.

Failure, its significance: From the individual point of view failure has its own significance, today’s innovation and scientific progress was in reality a long and arduous stretch of failed attempts but scientist and innovators didn’t gave up and still pursued the defined goals with double and renewed vigor after each failure and finally tasted success. Even most organizations bend over backward to avoid failure. They shouldn’t says economist paul Ormerod. History shows that failure and success are inherently random, so firms should innovate and adapt. Failure to admit a mistake can be a biggest failure there should be free forums and seminars to talk on a failure and free exchange of thoughts and ideas should come to the fore if we really don’s want failure to be repeated and reap some cost from the same.

Employing Failure as a process for continues learning: This could be best done by bringing innovation in practice; one should raise his credibility through learining from past failures and addressing the issues in a positive and challenging environment. Failure is useless unless we learn from it. Many innovations were notable from the need of humanity and were failed attempts in their nascent stage but the inventors although men from humble background paid back to society through their persistent effort and preservance for e.g.. ATM was invented by Luther Simijan a midecine dropout and cash register was invented by james ritty a saloon keeper.

A leader should know how to manage failure: there is an important story how to learn and face failure In the Indian context when ISROs attempt to launch a satellite failed, it was a big failure. That day in 1979, the chairman ISRO, prof satish dhawan, the leader of the organization, conducted the press conference himself. He took responsibility for the failure- - he said that the team had worked very hard, but that it needed more technological support. He assured the media that in another year, the team would definitely succeed. He took responsibility for the failure as chairman of the organization
The next year, in july 1980, ISRO again attempted to launch the satellite - - and this time they succeeded, the whole nation was jubilant. Again there was a press conference. Prof Dhawan called APJ abdul kalam aside and told him,’you “you conduct the press conference today.” It was an important lesson that day, when failure occurred, the leader of the organization owned that failure. When success came , he gave it to his team. APJ Abdul kalam remarked that the best management lesson did not come from reading a book; it came from that experience.

Overcoming failure

• Don’t be afraid to challenge the pros. Even in their own backyard. Sometimes you have to kill the sharks in their own waters
  


• Never neglet details. When everyone’s mind is dulled or distracted the leader must be doubly vigilant.
  


• You don’t know what you can get away with until you try.
  


• Fit no stereotypes. Don’s chase the latest management fads. The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team’s mission.
  


• Have fun in your command. Don’t always run at a breakneck pace. Spend time with your families.
  
  POST by Bijay Thapa. bijay-lifeinsurance.blogspot.com.