Hiring People That Fail

"I've come to believe that all my past failure and frustration were actually laying the foundation for the understandings that have created the new level of living I now enjoy."

-Tony Robbins

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The failures of your employees are the successes of your employees.

When you hire people that have made mistakes and/or allow people to make mistakes after you have hired them, you hire/have hired people that are forced to look back at their mistakes, figure out what went wrong and strategically execute a new plan of action. While all employees won't do this, any employee worth their salt, worth your time and consideration, will do, and has already done this. When hiring candidates for your open positions, ask them, directly, how they have accomplished this. Ask them what and how they have learned from and improved upon due to their failures. If they can not answer the question or they claim to have always been successful in their professional endeavors, they may not know what has made them successful; therefor, chances of them being able to duplicate past success, if it exists, will be slim to none.

To truly demand success from your employees, you must first, and always, demand failure. If your employees are not failing, they are not learning. If you employees are not learning, they are not advancing. If your employees are not advancing, they are not of value to your organization. If your employees are not of value to your organization, you are wasting your organizations time and resources. Mistakes proceed both innovation and success, both of which are at the heart of all successful organizations.

Demanding success by demanding failure starts during your hiring process. Ask about previous failures during your interviews with candidates. Getting candidates to acknowledge their previous failures is the first step. After you get candidates to acknowledge their failures, you then, and only then, can see if they have the ability to turn their failures into successes. While everyone can fail, not everyone can convert their failures into successes. Without a candidates ability to do this, you can not intelligently require that they be successful; they simply do not possess the ability to do so. Success requires the ability to successfully fail. All failure is not successful failure.