2. LEARNING WHILE LOSING
• Failure: An Invaluable Teacher
• When are Teams at Risk?
• Signs of Losing
• Turning Things Around
• Symptoms of Losing Teams
3. Some failure in life is inevitable. It is
impossible to live without failing in
something unless you live so cautiously
that you might as well have never lived at
all. In which case, you failed by default.
-- J.K.Rowling
4. Failure: An Invaluable Teacher
A failure can be a friend for it can
tell you where you are fallible,
allow you to tighten your game,
improve your career. The more
mistakes you make, the more
you learn about yourself and
your ability and consequently,
the better you can become
5. When are Teams at Risk?
• It is entirely possible to lose
because of external causes and
reasons beyond your control
7. Signs of Losing
• In losing teams, members don’t want
to take decisions
• They maintain the status quo even if
it is doomed and would rather fail
than be blamed
• In tough situations, losers like to
duck
• They feign injury or report sick so
that they can avoid facing the
challenge
8. Symptoms of Losing Teams
• Bureaucratic; delaying decisions
• Egos, internal competition, group-
ism
• Getting credit more important than
getting the job done
• Lack of Focus, energies spread thin
• Not Enough back-up plans
9. Symptoms of Losing Teams
• The same few people perform,
no new people or ideas
• Too many or too few processes
• Crab mentality
• Blaming others or the environ-
ment for failure
• Weighed down by past failure
10. Turning Things Around
• When the times are good,
stretch them, But when the
times are bad, stick to the
basics and be honest with
yourself
11. Turning Things Around Contd…
• A team may be anxious to turn
things around as fast as
possible but performance does
not improve overnight,
especially if the defects have
been allowed to build up over a
period of time. Everyone,
including the leader, must be
patient
12. Positive side of Mistakes
• Mistakes are invaluable
because they teach you lessons
• Mistakes warn you about where
you shouldn’t be going and what
not to do the next time round
13. • Winning is not about not making
mistakes, but about how to
learn from them and become
wiser and stronger.