Dr Gustavo Espinoza-Ramos, Lecturer in Management and Marketing at the University of Westminster, has written an article about how academics can learn to handle failure in their professional lives for the Times Higher Education magazine.
In the article, Dr Espinoza-Ramos argues that failure offers opportunities for self-reflection and can improve resilience and creativity. Failure, Dr Espinoza-Ramos argues, is incorrectly labelled as an entirely negative experience.
He says: “[Failure] enhances our ability to withstand adversity and respond to the challenges that we face. [It] improves our capability to generate new ideas and solutions to overcome different issues.”
Dr Espinoza-Ramos explains that failure is inevitable and that it should be seen as part of a self-improvement process. There are also external factors which can affect our ability to learn from failure, Dr Espinoza-Ramos argues.
He writes: “It is important that an organisation’s values, mission, and vision avoid a blame culture. Instead, it should welcome failure as part of a learning moment, creating opportunities for sharing mistakes and, more importantly, lessons learned… analysing why things did not work instead of pointing out people. This will create a culture of compassion, trust, and creativity, boosting employee morale.”
Dr Espinoza-Ramos encourages academics by telling them that they will find new uses for their work that hasn’t been published and notes that keeping a selection of what he calls their “victory moments” is a fantastic way to keep up morale whilst handling failure.
Read the full article on the Times Higher Education magazine’s website.
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