Sunday, March 30, 2008

A Failure Tolerant Culture Leads to Success

The Great Britain cycling team has just won an unprecedented 9 gold medals at the World Track Championships, held this year in Manchester, England. While home advantage might count for something, this article on BBC News is telling. Director of Performance, David Brailsford is clearly a leader who understand the importance of the W. Edwards Deming principle of first you drive out fear (point 8 of his 14 Points of Management). Brailsford puts his failure tolerant attitude at the top of his importance list when it comes to the secret of the team’s success.

“You cobble them all [athletes and staff] together, give them a good environment, you push them, make them not scared to fail,” said Brailsford.

“And you say ‘Let’s end up all over the track having tried to win rather than play safe and get a silver or bronze’. You remove that fear from the athletes and off we go.”

Time and again, I find it difficult to find better management and leadership advice than Deming. I find that creating a failure tolerant, fear free, innovative culture is the key to creating continuous improvement and ultimately achieving world class performance. It’s remarkable how well this advice holds up across so many walks of life: manufacturing; sports; and knowledge workers professions. Technorati tag: Management+Science