What Leaders Can Learn from Failure
No matter how hard we all try, everyone inevitably makes mistakes and experiences failure from time to time in their professional lives. Successful leaders take responsibility for their mistakes, but don’t beat themselves up over them. Once they’ve acknowledged where they went wrong, they explore what they could have done differently and use that knowledge to do better in the future.This week, I’ve been reading about what leaders can learn from failure and how they can use the knowledge they gain to transform themselves, their teams and their organizations. I think you’ll find these recent blog posts and articles useful. Failure Is Not the End. It's an Opportunity to Learn. Entrepreneur: “I’m not here to say there is no such thing as failure. Failure is very real, but it is not an end destination -- it's another event in the course of life. Experiencing one failure or 100 does not make you a failure. Failure is an external event that happens. It is not a personality characteristic. One who fails a lot, we could say, takes a lot of risks. It's important to separate the events of failure from the personal characteristic of being a failure. Failure is an opportunity to learn. When we confuse our personal sense of self-value with success, we are restricting our ability to learn because our ego becomes another factor in this equation. Our ego tells us we succeeded because we're so smart and so great, or that we failed because we are a loser and can't win at anything.”6 Warning Signs That You're Failing as a Leader and How to Avoid It. Inc.: “No matter what position you are in, what you do, or where you come from, you can always grow. You can always develop. You can always become a better version of yourself….Growing leaders are those who explore and take risks. Risk is the bedrock of progress; without it, your development will get stuck. Sometimes your leadership has to push you out and engage you with more challenges. If you find yourself settling for what you already know rather than developing into new, unknown territories, your growth has been halted somewhere. When you are complacent, you've made friends with stagnation.”4 Leadership Lessons We Can Learn from Sports. SmartBlog on Leadership: “In his book ‘Players First,’ University of Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari stresses the need for players to ‘fail fast’ so they can learn from their mistakes, make corrections and move on. He explains that bouncing back faster leads to success faster. This advice also holds true in the business world. Gail Kelly, the CEO of Australia’s second‐largest bank, explains, ‘How are you going to learn and how are you going to innovate unless you fail? You need to fail fast, quickly, and then get up and off you go again.’ Adapting to a rapidly‐changing world requires the ability to fail fast, make the necessary adjustments and move forward with confidence. Managers can play a valuable role by helping their employees learn how to bounce back. Even successful companies embrace failures and figure out how to move past them proactively. The history of business has consistently shown the utility of failure a as springboard to success.”The Value of Sharing Mistakes. Associations Now: “The latest issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review reports on a recent trend of TED Talk- and Ignite-style events in which entrepreneurs share their shortcomings and failures. The events—I’ll call them ‘Foulup Nights’ here, but the real name is saltier—launched in Mexico City in 2012 and have since taken place in more than 100 cities, according to the founders. The events are ‘a chance to reflect on bad decisions, missed opportunities, episodes of poor execution, and pivots that never paid off,’ Greg Beato writes. ‘Unlike TED, a conference series that focuses on ‘ideas worth spreading,’ [Foulup] Nights showcases ideas worth shedding.’...In a tough situation, there’s safety in numbers. One of the virtues of Foulup Nights is that it builds in the feeling that lots of people have been through a bad business move and have lived to tell the tale.”How Failing Leads to Success. Sylvan Learning: “In business, there isn’t a lot of room for mistakes, and failure is not an option. Rarely do leaders allow wiggle room for mistakes and failures. And I understand why – because we are constantly striving to be perfect. Throughout my career as an employer, I have embraced mistakes made by my staff, as long as it motivated them to get better – to continue fighting for the light bulb. You cannot train work ethic, commitment, and loyalty, but you can train new methods, processes, and systems to help ensure that same mistake isn’t made in the future. As long as the right attitude is accompanied by the mistake, greatness can still happen. The next time that you think you failed – or someone else tells you that you made a mistake, look at it as a stepping stone to success.”Need help developing your company’s leaders and teaching them how to learn from their failures? Contact us; we’re happy to assist.Success Labs is a leadership development and management consulting firm in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. For more than 25 years, our expert team of consultants has worked with hundreds of companies to explore their business potential and improve their company and cultural performance. Contact us to get proactive about your people strategy.
