As I sit here writing this article, I look back across the decades of my career and can easily pick out the events that fundamentally changed me and forced growth. I'm fairly confident in stating that all the success I've had in my career has been as a result of me screwing up in one way or another and being forced to learn. Failure gives us fantastic opportunity to grow as it shows us clearly what doesn't work and forces us to reflect inwardly on what we need to do differently.
Building a successful career requires tremendous fortitude and bravery. Ambition and drive result in you often putting yourself in situations where you're not always entirely equipped. Conscious of the risk of failure. As you climb the career ladder, roles become less available and competition is rife. Those who succeed are individuals who are able to best recover and learn the lessons from setbacks and failure.
When interviewing people for roles, especially senior positions. I'm far more interested in understanding where things didn't go right for the candidate than those that did. What lessons did they learn and what did they carry forward. A senior executives ability to self reflect and recognise their own missteps and failures are a great indicator of real talent.
Given that most successful people are a culmination of their response to failures, why don't we talk more about failure in the workplace? Why do we have corporate cultures where getting things wrong is frowned upon? We are all to eager to celebrate the successes but discouraged from discussing the failures, even though we understand that this is often where the real value and learning comes from?
Firstly, it's critical for organisations to embed the understanding within their cultures that there is a vast difference between failure and under performance. The former (failure) being an unsuccessful endeavor with an opportunity for personal and group learning. The latter (under performance) being a consistent pattern of low quality output and an inability to learn from mistakes and failure. Within many organisations, the two things are so closely intertwined that any mention of a failing immediately insinuates under performance. This couldn't be further from the truth and breeds a culture of obfuscation.
There are some genuinely game changing business benefits to embracing and normalising failure within your organisation. Here are my top three:
Visibility Like it or not, every organisation has things go wrong and nobody wants to be the one to blame. Nobody ever sets out to fail, however unfortunately it happens to us all. Most organisations have a traditional 'blame' culture. If something goes wrong, somebody needs to be responsible and that person needs to be suitably chastised or punished.
The problem with this approach is simple, it's human nature to not want to look stupid or get into trouble. People (and groups of people) will go to often extreme lengths and expend considerable organisational resources to prevent themselves from getting into trouble and looking stupid. Many of these people succeed, leaving organisational time bombs lurking in the ether to rear their ugly heads when you least need (or expect) it.
By encouraging and enabling success but removing the stigma from failure, you not only gain early visibility of the potential hidden time bombs (and can plan to address them) but you gain significant organisational efficiencies by removing the significant time spent trying to hide or shift the blame.
Group Learning In any size or organisation, it's common for people to be working in similar areas and on similar tasks. It's equally common for failures and errors to be repeated again and again, by different people, sapping organisational efficiency. In more traditional 'blame based' business cultures this behavior is common-place.
When a safe space is created to share stories and experiences when things haven't gone quite right, that learning can be shared across the team/business and the chance of multiple instances of the same failure reduce substantially.
Accountability One of the quickest routes to cultural excellence within an organisation is making your teams accountable for the work they've done to the wider business. It's one of the reasons why a good internal communications strategy is essential in any organisation. An open culture that removes the stigma from failure allows individuals and departments to own and be accountable for,the successes, the failures and the learning.
As with all organisational and cultural change, the process of implementing this is a challenging road. A leadership team who's historically been given a sanitised view of the world is going to find it uncomfortable when faced with the reality of just how much gets buried on a day to day basis. I encourage you to take some comfort in the fact that these things were happening anyway - you've just created a space where they can become visible. As a business leader, you can only help make things better when you can see the challenges in the cold light of day.
