Having the courage to start a business takes a lot of optimism, to begin with, having the courage to dedicate yourself to it is much different. When taking on the responsibility of starting a business, the pressure can be overwhelming. Wouldn’t it be great if you could start a business and generate profits the next day? Unfortunately, this is not the way it works, nor will it ever be, great businesses take time. They involve a lot of planning, setbacks, complete failures, and the continuous will to learn.
Deals will fall through, team members will give up, funding may not be received, the list goes on. You must believe in what you’re doing and have a reason for doing it that will prevent you from giving up. Oftentimes, when we make a mistake, we question ourselves with questions born out of doubt. The ability to answer those questions at the moment will come from your reasoning for success. No success story doesn’t involve failure, successful entrepreneurs only became successful after learning from mistakes.
The first key to overcoming business failure is to accept that it will happen. As a business leader, you must try everything you can to succeed, but not everything will be perfect. Once you have grounded yourself in the vision of the organization, build a team that will hold you accountable. A great team will be able to help you find solutions to problems, complete tasks more efficiently, and create cohesion in your development process. To prepare yourself to find these great people who will help you on your quest for success, here’s some advice:
Have A Vision
It is important to know what you’re after, what goals do you want to reach in 5 years with your business? Once you understand what you’re setting out to do, failure will become a useful tool to highlight where you need improvement to reach your goals. Failing can be hard and it’s normal to get frustrated at the moment. You must try to stop looking at failure as failure, look at it as an opportunity to get better. Implementing this will make you unstoppable and attract individuals to your vision that can help along the way.
Failure Isn’t Personal
Just because something didn’t work out, doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea or that you’re in over your head. Entering any market is a matter of careful research and lucky timing. You can analyze your audience as much as possible but, it is impossible to predict for certain if something is going to stick. Leaders must look at what went wrong and take measures to mitigate it for the next attempt.
Take Accountability
Failures cannot be blamed on individuals, if the team attempts something and it goes wrong, the whole team is at fault. As a leader, you must recognize yourself in the areas that went wrong and improve your approach to mitigate. This is another way to lead by example, if your team sees you reacting to a crisis with open-mindedness to do better next attempt, they will do the same.
Remember the easiest thing to do is point fingers at everyone but yourself. This will get you nowhere in the development process and only ensure the likelihood of failure again.
Post Failure Analysis
As we’ve covered, learning from failures and using them to do better is important. For the sake of an organization, after you’ve set out to complete a task, successful or unsuccessful, meet as a team. When you meet, highlight what went wrong and what went right, without applying blame. Make this a habit so that the team reflexively looks for ways to improve and also learn what they’re good at. The accountability with no blame tactic will also create further cohesion within the team and make development processes much smoother.
Conclusion
Failure generates negative emotions, our natural inhibition will always tell us the bad things first. As an entrepreneur and a leader, the most important skill you can have is emotional intelligence. Of course, when something goes wrong, you will want to shout and tell everyone who contributed what a mess the situation is. No good will come from handling situations this way, instead, we must not lose sight of the vision.
Remember why this business is important to you, what kind of life it will allow you to live, and the people whose lives will benefit from it.
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