How do you react to failure, either yours or that of a team member? Do you feel embarrassed? Ashamed? Was it a mistake that you would take back? This reaction is one of the key differences between teams that achieve amazing things, and those that produce the same, predictable results over and over again.
We are taught from a young age to look at failure as a mistake, and the fewer mistakes made the better. We assume that there is an inversely proportional relationship between success and mistakes: the fewer mistakes, the more quickly success must be achieved. The truly brilliant among us have no idea what failure is, and perpetually bask in the constant stream of success that their efforts inevitably result in.
That nonsense is as poisonous as it is untrue. Successful people are that way in large part not because they avoided mistakes; quite the opposite! The story of every successful person I have ever known is punctuated by risks that don’t always work out, failures survived, and mistakes turned into lessons. Successful people are the ones who have survived the most failures, and pushed on in spite of them.
“The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.”
Henry Ford
Leadership and Failure
Leaders should neither avoid risks nor embrace them uncritically. Instead careful consideration should be given to any effort that has a high likelihood of failure, and the following criteria applied:
- What is the likelihood of failure?
- What is the cost of failure (discounting the value of lessons learned)?
- What is the value of success?
Most of you should recognize the above for what it is: a very simple ROI calculation. And, like all ROI calculations, you have to be sure to include the value of all outcomes. The part that gets left out is the value of the lessons that failure can teach.
What is the value of trying something bold and new that doesn’t work out, but teaches an incredibly valuable lesson that can lead to new projects or impact the way your team operates going forward? Is it worth the cost of the initial failed effort? Compare this instead with pursuing the safe approach where failure isn’t possible, but neither is learning anything new. What kind of team do you want to manage? Which of these approaches truly provides the most value to the company?
Leveraging Risk
In order to truly start leveraging risk, it’s critical to get into the right mindset. You can’t expect your team to bring you bold new ideas unless they are seriously entertained, or to try things that might not work if they are chastised for failure. It is important to create a culture of calculated risks, creative thinking, and bold actions, and to do that your team members have to believe through repeated experience these are the things that you value.
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”
Winston Churfhill
If you view failure as a mistake, then your team will respond by not taking any of the risks that might result in one. If you view failure as a chance taken and a lesson learned, then your team will follow that lead and will start to produce the truly unexpected and brilliant things that humans are capable of when they aren’t constrained by fear and anxiety. Your words and actions are a major component of how many novel ideas and innovative approaches your team produces.
