“If you don’t show up after a loss, you become a loser.”

I wrote that quote on the board at a meeting this morning.  Then I wrote, “Learn from your loss and adjust to get a win.  Become a winner.” The meeting was a group of outstanding students working on our Huskie Community Network project.  They needed to hear those quotes.  They just experienced a loss.

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The Huskie Community Network is a group of students building on the Yolobe platform to connect students in the high school to local opportunities.  It is an intense project that involves two building blocks; the students and local opportunities.  The group found out the hard way that it is not easy to build the community opportunities network.  Last week, we had an open house for businesses and professionals to bring in their opportunities and learn how to input them on the Yolobe platform.  Our students worked for weeks on contacting and inviting many businesses to attend.  The night of the open house came and only 3 professionals showed up.  Two of them were parents of one of our project team members.

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Major fail.  Major learning opportunity.

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The time between that fail and today’s meeting was hard for the students.  A few came to speak with me personally about the problems in the groups lack of effort.  Blaming and finger pointing was happening.  Many wanted to quit.  I loved every minute of it.  It challenged me as a leader and facilitator of this group to step up to the challenge.  Before the loss happened, I spoke with the Founder of Yolobe.  I felt like our project was not going get the high number of business owners at the upcoming function.  He asked me a question that reminded me that communication is extremely important.  He asked, “Do you think we prepared them to succeed?”  There it was.  The answer.  It was no.

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After the failed open house, we spoke about getting the team back up to perform.  We talked about the positives of the meeting.  We talked about how we thought the students felt.  It was eye opening.  The Founder of Yolobe was still looking at the positives.  That taught me to look for the positives and build off them.

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A few days before our first meeting after the failure, I did a lot of research.  I came across 4 questions from the Harvard Business Review that worked perfectly for the meeting.  The questions are:

1. What were we trying to accomplish?
2. Where did we hit and where did we miss?
3. What caused our results?
4. What should we stop doing and what should we start doing?

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Only seven members showed up this morning for the meeting.  They are winners.  We went through the questions in an honest and open format.  The finger pointing stopped and the team really looked at what really went wrong.  They went deep into some viable solutions to build the business and professional pieces for the project.  It was a positive meeting that left people feeling optimistic in the next attempt at the project.  We all learned from this.  We all learned that it is essential to work through challenges when they occur.  We learned that failure provides opportunity.  They learned how to #disrupteducation.

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Read more about the Huskie Community Network HERE