Failure is inevitable in business. When faced with failure, all you can do is to learn from them and not make the same mistakes again. Though it sounds simple and straightforward, some leaders do not learn from their mistakes and take the business on the right path. Learning does not come from experiencing a bad result but profound comprehension of what led to the failure.
It’s these mistakes that are hidden by leaders that jeopardise organisations. The reason for leaders to hide such mistakes, deny or downplay these failures is because it affects their image. So it seems rational to hide it from their point of view. It’s natural for most leaders to hide failure as it looks bad.
Due to this, normalising failure is most effectively embodied by leaders. Failure or mistakes that cost the business organisations millions of rupees, some mistakes are quantified while most are not as there is no perfect science in assessing the commercial value of losses.
Failing is inevitable, but the journey doesn’t stop there. We have to change our perception to truly embrace it and grow. It may feel uncomfortable to admit but talking about shortcomings can help clear the vision. It can reveal flaws that wouldn’t have otherwise been noticed and point us to a new direction.
Successful entrepreneurs rarely end up with the original version of their product. They test ideas, encounter detours, fail and spring back. They analyse their obstacles, speak openly about their failure and learn from them.
Beliefs are misguided
If you are a leader who exudes achievement, sprints up the ladder and earns big bucks, your co-workers probably resent you to some extent. High-achievers can win over their colleagues with a simple approach: by sharing the failures they encountered on the path to success.
It is a generally accepted norm that failure is bad. These widely held beliefs are misguided. First, failure is not always bad. In organisational life it is sometimes bad, sometimes inevitable, and sometimes even good. The attitudes and activities needed to effectively detect and analyse failure is in short supply in most companies, and the need for context-specific learning strategies is underappreciated.
Organisations need new and better ways to go beyond lessons that are superficial or self-serving. Failure and faults are virtually inseparable in most organisations, and cultures.
Every employee learns at some point that admitting failure means taking the blame. That is why so few organisations have shifted to a culture of psychological safety in which the rewards of learning from failure can be fully realised.
A sophisticated understanding of causes for failure and contexts will help avoid the blame game and institute an effective strategy for learning from the failure. Although an infinite number of things could go wrong in organisations, mistakes fall into three broad categories: preventable, complexity-related and intelligent.
For all organisations and managers failure is a recurring reality. But despite failure being all pervasive, few individuals or organisations respond positively. Making failure work productively requires leaders to recognise that plans need to be adaptable in a dynamic environment; failure must be built into the culture and everyone attuned to fail, adapt and learn. We have long believed that over time organisations get comfortable doing the same thing, merely making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.
Personal tragedy
People often respond to workplace failure as they might respond to personal tragedy. They don’t know what on earth to say or how to read or assess it, so they avoid discussing it entirely. Make it your mission to address the elephant in the room, by acknowledging the failure and looking to understand underlying causes.
Learning is crucial for a positive culture, but it hardly ever happens without mistakes, hick-ups, or failure. Learning fast and learning from others’ failure as well, helps your organisation become more consistently and frequently successful.
We are all tempted to put our failures behind us. After all, we typically win jobs and promotions based on reciting our resume of successes, not by recounting our failures. However, sharing the practical learning from a failed activity more broadly can be helpful to you as well as to others in your organisation. Find the right avenue for sharing: an email, a white paper, a talk, or a presentation. It’s a useful way to explore and expand your organisation’s tolerance for failure, and to illuminate how these stories make their way.
Don’t hide your failures – it’s you who will lose not anyone else.
