Encouraging failure

Leadership success comes from failure. Sometimes many, many failures.

You are going to have failures

As you develop, grow, and do your best to give your best, you’re going to run headlong into the path of something that most of us will go to great lengths to avoid: failure. We’ll blame others, blame our circumstances, and blame the weather to avoid responsibility for failure. Most usually and tragically we avoid failure by avoiding those things at which we aren’t sure we can succeed.

Here’s the truth: if you aren’t failing at least occasionally, you aren’t doing anything of long-term value for yourself or others.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I absolutely want to avoid failure in everything I do. I work for success and I expect excellence in others and in myself. So why do I fail? Why will you—and I mean will, not might—fail?

Failing means learning something new

We are most vulnerable to failure when we are trying something new, in other words, when we are learning. The bigger the lesson, the higher the potential benefit, and the more dramatic the failure is likely to be.

An Olympic hopeful learning a new vault is going to have some spectacular failures, and probably more than a few injuries as a result. But when she finally reaches the goal, in this case a new skill, her chances for gold are increased dramatically.

Likewise as you progress through your academic and into your professional career, and even in your personal life, you will be learning big lessons. Sometimes you’ll be successful the first time out. You will feel pretty good about this, but you will have learned only a little that you will be able to apply elsewhere. This is because you completed something that you were already equipped to do.

It might be good for you, but it still sucks

That said, let’s remember that failure is still unpleasant, usually for everyone involved, and in some cases is pretty costly.

After any one failure you cannot guarantee, to yourself or to others, that you will make your goal on the next attempt. But what you can, and should, expect is not to repeat the same failure twice. As you are failing in new ways you are still learning. When you start to repeat past failures—failing at the same place in the same way—you’ve stopped learning and you need to step back and figure out why.

As a leader you have another obligation, besides just understanding and acting upon your own failures. You have to allow failure in those around you, and in those on your team. In fact, for long term growth and real innovation, you have to encourage your team to put themselves in situations where failure is an option. And you also have to be prepared for those failures, and know how you are going to react to protect the business when they do happen.

Recognize failure as the currency of success, not as an occasion for recrimination and remorse.

This post is inspired by material in my book, The Only Trait of a Leader.