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It can be so hard to watch people fail—but it is a critical piece to being a good boss. Learning to let your employees take risks and try out new ways of doing things has significant positive impacts on their development, your reputation, and the overall functioning of your team.
First, if you are able to impart the wisdom that failing fast is a good thing signifying thinking outside the box, healthy risk taking and learning some important lessons, you are setting your employees up for success. The confidence they gain from your leadership will push them further in their roles and careers as they become comfortable with trying new things instead of becoming comfortable with the status quo.
Second, as a manager who supports employees as they try new ways of doing things, you’ll quickly gain a reputation as being supportive and secure. It takes a certain level of confidence to know that if your employees try and fail, you and your team are strong enough to recover and try again. Further, letting employees take risks also demonstrates your acknowledgement that either you don’t have all the answers, or you are willing to let your employees learn their own lessons by failure. Sometimes people have to see how something won’t work for themselves before truly letting go of an idea.
Finally, the functioning of your team depends on your ability to nurture new ideas, not stifle them. You’ll retain employees and increase morale by creating a trusting culture for experimentation. And those things are key to the overall functioning of your team. This is about the long term development of your employees and your department—if they feel supported to try and fail, and if they receive your encouragement, coaching and lessons along the way, their ideas will become bigger and better overtime, setting your team up for long term success.
This is not to say that letting go and witnessing someone fail is easy. It can be really difficult. However, if the stakes are not that great, and the lessons your employees will learn are greater than the potential risk they pose in their experimentation, then you should get behind them. It may be unnerving at first but as you settle into a quiet confidence, you see the tremendous opportunity this approach can have for your team and for yourself as a leader.