No matter the budget, size, scope or scale of your business and no matter who you are as a leader, you’ll always have plenty of tools at your disposal, whether they are physical things stored on a bench or toolbox, or whether they are a set of mental techniques or digital tools – you will always have plenty of tools and means at your disposal to deal with the tasks at hands.
We’ve all had issues with techniques and tools. Teething issues that hold us back and stop us from heading full speed towards success and instead of focusing on the issue, it can be all too easy to blame the tools and techniques of the trade and why they don’t work for you. Maybe we should be thinking more about why you aren’t working for the tools and techniques that seem to have lead everyone else to success.
What tools are we speaking about? Well – anything that you’d use to get the job done from SCRUM to saws. Be it a risk management stratagem, a mechanical briquette press, industry standard code or a hammer; you’ll have something in your specific line of work that’s the standard. Then you’ll have options that are specific to you – be it an improvisation or a technique that you have developed yourself.
Now, these tools and techniques can fail. They might not work or they may not be implemented correctly, they might break or bend. However, It seems that more often than not, these tools don’t work because of our own approach. We might be asking or expecting too much of the tools that we use instead of question how and why we are performing specific actions, which could led to improvement via a consideration of our day to day processes.
It’s said that a good worker never blames their tools. They look for the outside of the box thinking to get around their issue, and if a job isn’t being done correctly, they look within and not externally. However, we are becoming more inclined to blame processes, workflows, and tools – we are blurring important lines, and this could lead to disaster.
When we make mistakes, or reach a dead end, maybe we should not blame our tools. We should become a master of the techniques of our trade, but that can only come from practice. No matter what you set out to use, you need to find ways to become the master of that tool or technique. The ways and means and methods of doing things in the workplace will change and so will the tools, but when things go wrong, we will always find other things to blame instead of our own actions. Critically, this can prevent us from learning from our mistakes. That’s bad news indeed. Don’t blame your tools, instead – learn from your mistakes and discover how you might be able to become a better worker. It can be easy to find excuses, but it’s harder to accept mistakes and develop – finding excuses won’t help your progress, though.
