There is a lot of talk about meritocracy now a days. Ray Dalio has famously built his Principles around this idea, I believe. But just as importantly I believe we need to include a demeritocracy. That is we get merits when we step up and succeed but we also get demerits when we step up and fail.
It does not have to be the electric chair for us when we fail but, I believe that we need to recognise clearly the difference between failure and success and take responsibility for either. A simple accolade for our successes or a frozen chicken for example and an acknowledgement and a simple apology for any failures. (We used to do that at our soccer club. What started out as a dinner for two award, ended up as a simple frozen chicken being presented to the best player).
Of course these successes get added up in our psyche as merits and the failures also get added up as demerits. Unfortunately our society seems to be going the way of gold stamps for all our successes and failures which I do not agree with.
I recently posted a comment on Ray’s Linkedin post stating this:
“There is certainly some merit in what you say Ray, in my view. I guess like any idea it can be taken too far, though. Example, “I am the expert here and what would this novice know about our business”. So I guess factoring in this possibility is also important. My brother and I have developed a simple system of stepping up. Whoever is brave enough to step up and succeeds gets the merit points, (accolades) but if he fails gets some demerit points (apologies). Imagine if the tea lady was brave enough to step up to the plate (as in you analogy) on how we should run our business and we were brave enough to let her do a trial, who knows what could happen. But I agree merits and also demerits are the way to go.”
Object123 