From Silence to Sharing – Shifting Your Culture Around Mistakes
I’d love to ask you a question.
“Do you and those within your organisation feel confident in being open to sharing mistakes and challenges at work?”
Over the last few years, I have asked this question to leaders, executives, business owners and my peers, and eight times out of ten people responded with no.
How your organisation views failure will ingrain the behaviour of whether sharing lessons, mistakes, and challenges is part of the culture. This has a direct impact on productivity and connection within the organisation. People waste time and resources by reinventing the wheel, reliving the mistakes of others, and wasting time researching solutions and information to create future success.
Many organisational cultures do not encourage or condone the sharing of challenges or failures. This means that sharing might never enter your mind, especially if your current organisation is all you have ever known.
Research by IDC shows that Fortune 500 companies lose a combined $31.5 billion annually due to employees failing to share knowledge and lessons effectively.A study by Harvard Business Review found that only 24% of employees say their company openly discusses failure, and even fewer say they feel safe doing so themselves.According to Deloitte, organisations with strong knowledge-sharing cultures are 92% more likely to innovate and 52% more productive.The Gift Mindset is the portal to creating a culture of openness, sharing, connection and collaboration.
A Gift Mindset is a mindset where we are open to unwrapping the lessons (gifts) in challenging experiences and even challenging people.
Sharing these lessons can progress us and others forward in an open forum.
Why share challenges and mistakes?
When people can share challenges, mistakes, and failures in a safe space, they are encouraged and supported to move beyond these.
Promotes innovation and creativity as people feel open to creating and taking risks. Helps build trust and psychological safety. Encourages a learning organisation that promotes learning and sharing. Enhances problem-solving skills and helps get to the root cause. Helps avoid costly mistakes and when discussed, this can prevent serious errors. Improves team collaboration as openly discussing mistakes encourages teamwork and cooperation. Reduces repetitive errors if these are shared out in the open. Sharing our lessons could be a survival guide for someone else. Identifying how we got through something helps us deepen and develop key soft skills such as resilience, optimism, curiosity and growth. Failing to share what we have learnt is selfish. Sharing drives connection, innovation, communication and collaboration.
There are many strategies we can implement, including:
Win Wednesday: Encourage individuals or teams to share a win and how they achieved it, including the challenges and mistakes faced along the way.
Failure Fridays: Share a mistake, challenge, or failure, what helped them through it, and the key learnings. Discuss learnings openly — you’ll often see others contribute similar stories and lessons.
1:1 Sessions: Use individual catchups to encourage people to share challenges, setbacks, and opportunities. Deep dive into what went wrong and how that lesson can feed into future development plans.
Monthly Learning Forums or Story Circles: Create a consistent, safe space where teams can bring a “lesson” to the table. This can be done virtually or face-to-face. The key is consistency and modelling openness from leadership.
Leader-led Vulnerability: Leaders going first in sharing their lessons, missteps, or moments of doubt sets the tone. When leaders are real, others follow. This builds trust and allows authentic connection to flourish.
Create a “Lesson Library”: Capture lessons learnt. Whether it’s post-project reviews or informal recaps and make them accessible across the organisation. This turns one mistake into a learning moment for many.
It’s important to note that while sharing mistakes is beneficial, it should always be accompanied by a supportive environment. Employees need to feel encouraged to learn, rather than being shamed for getting something wrong. This will foster a positive and constructive learning culture within the workplace — what we call a Gift Mindset Culture.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
Lead to be limitless.
