Recently a participant in one of our sessions said that she learned as much from all the mistakes she’s made on the job as she has from doing things right. That got me thinking. She’d been in the organization, a national retailer with 1,000s of stores, for a long time and was recently promoted to an even more significant position. Certainly if she’s making mistakes someone’s noticed. More importantly, they also understood that there was value in the missteps. To truly grow in a position and more broadly for a company to become stronger and more competitive this is an important message. Failure is feedback. Learn from your mistakes. Get better from those experiences. Not all retailers embrace this value as part of their culture. For those that do, there is a significant advantage for them. Mistakes create learning moments. Innovation often comes from ‘mistakes’. Creativity and trust are strengthened through efforts that fall short but are not punished. It seems that ‘Forgiveness’ is a corporate value that more companies should embrace. Learning from shortfalls can be a very good thing. Share your reaction to this blog here in comments or tweet us @mohrretail.

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About MOHR Retail

For more than 30 years, MOHR Retail has developed the critical people-to-people skills needed to create results in the retail industry—and we’re just getting started. Through innovative classroom and online learning methods, as well as our ongoing national retail research projects, we continue to stay on top of the trends so we can fuel the success of specialty stores, chain stores, outlets, catalogue retailers, department stores, and more. Nowhere does learning meet experience as it does in a MOHR Retail training program.