When it comes to leadership, learning from failure means embracing setbacks as valuable opportunities for growth, developing resilience, fostering humility, and gaining insights into areas for improvement. Leaders own failure by learning from mistakes and analysing – where did it go wrong? – which allows them to construct new strategies and become more resilient through experiencing challenges and setbacks. This approach will secure learning opportunities for Leaders to deploy for future change initiatives.
Failure is a word no one wants to hear. To fail is to makes mistakes or to be unsuccessful. Yet we all experience moments of failure in both our personal and professional lives. However, it is the ability to own failure, self-reflect on the learnings, and develop resilience from the experience is something that can make or break a Leader.
Leaders create organisational cultures where failure is acceptable, which is important for fostering agility and tolerance for ambiguity. Most organisations have come to the consensus that failure is an inevitable by-product of any attempts to innovate and thus should be tolerated – if not outright encouraged. But failure can foster innovation at every level, ranging from incremental changes to disruptive innovation initiatives and that can change entire value propositions or business models.
How Leaders respond to failure is what matters?
Use failure as a learning opportunity.
Failure is a normal part of personal and professional growth. It is a significant step along the path to success, but only if you learn to view failures and setbacks as new learning opportunities, rather than fatal flaws.
Perspective of failure as a source of feedback
Take the view of failure as a source of feedback. Ask yourself (and your team) what lessons you can learn from the failure that can benefit future efforts. Identify what went wrong and figure out the things you (and your team) could have done differently. Then, take that information and incorporate into your next attempts. After all, failure should not be considered final as failing should redirect your steps but not end the change journey.
When you begin to accept failure as a learning opportunity, you enable yourself (and your team) to “fail forward.” Analysing the mistakes made and the resulting failures. Therefore, use the lessons to guide you toward other methods and options, hopefully with avoiding in the distant future the mistakes already made.
Success is the outcome of failure prevention
Of course, success certainly feels better than setbacks! Failures will happen but success remains the main goal for any organisation with initiating change transformation. When you do succeed, then you must take a step back and reflect, analyse your success but similarly like your analysis of failure.
Then, identify “what” went right and strategise the areas and tasks that you (and your team) did well. Taking what you learn and carrying these insights over to the next opportunity that you pursue. Learn from your successes might prevent some of the failures next time.
Teaching your teams that failure is okay
Great teams succeed but they also fail as well. When a project fails, do not start blaming individuals or certain teams. Share the failure with the entire team and share the learnings. Only through experiencing setbacks and practicing better ways of responding to failure, can your team develop the skills needed to manage and overcome challenges.
Great Leaders foster an environment where failure is okay. This comment is true. Team members don’t hide their mistakes and place the onus of self-reflection on themselves but share them collectively with others. They are accountable, take responsibility, and acknowledge what went wrong but they realise failing does not make them a failure.
Your team must be able to make mistakes to allow them to innovate with change. With failure is freedom to innovate, because discovering new ways of working encourages confidence, to try other methods or invent new ways to increase productivity. When you coach your team that failure is okay, you empower them to take risks – and this determines the path for innovation.
Responding to failure by rising above and beyond
With navigating past setbacks and disappointments, what you learn from and how you respond to failure are critical There are many lessons that Leaders reflect on and to help lessen the unpleasantness of failures, but the three (3) main lessons are the following:
- Do not fear failure and do not hide from it or ignore it. Simply acknowledge what has happened and accept failure on its due merits.
- Use the learnings from failure to your advantage. Use the time to reflect on how you failed, what could have been changed, what did not work and what did work. Transform the failure into an opportunity to gain new experiences, a chance to adapt, to pivot and change direction.
- Minimise future failure. Learn from your lessons and take appropriate steps to reduce the chances of repeating that same mistake again or the failure.
Questions for Leaders to consider
- Are you afraid to fail?
- Do you openly discuss business failures as a team?
- Do you discuss what went wrong and what was learned?
- Have you ever told your team it is okay to make mistakes and to fail at something?
Why learning from failure defines your new journey?
Celebrating failure encourages your continuous improvement and channels the drive with new energy towards success.
In supportive work environments, employees quickly learn from mistakes (in real-time) and adapt to future projects with ease. Leaders continually help employees evolve by developing new skills, engaging new training programs, and improving team performance. They also identify or create customised learning opportunities for their team and the organisation benefits from better productivity.
Leaders need to facilitate a culture of sustained learning
The number one (1) reason employees provide for not developing new skills is a lack of time. This is not about being initiative-taking and collaborating with Managers to assist with managing time for training, but the fall back with excuses by employees for non-development by their organisation.
To help overcome excuses and intentionally facilitate a culture of sustained learning, then Leaders should initiate the following:
Facilitate time for experimentation with innovative ideas
Allow your employees to “think outside the box” and brainstorm innovative ideas. As employees push boundaries, they will fail frequently but that is also the objective with learning valuable skills along the change journey.
Lead by example, be real and authentic with your approach
As a Leader, create psychological safety amongst your team and by sharing your own mistakes – Where did I fail? What did I learn? How do I correct my actions? How will this experience help me with future learnings? – by cultivating (and modelling) an environment where failure is celebrated, as part of the experimentation process.
“Celebrating failure with change” means viewing failure as a stepping stone towards positive change. By acknowledging a setback or mistake not as a negative event, but as an opportunity for growth and future improvement. Employees are supported and encouraged to actively adjust and based on the lessons learned from failure.
Coaching through both successes and failures
Leaders build a platform for your team to review, reflect, and learn from failures together. These learnings advocate an approach for the topic of failure, with a positive outlook – What did we learn? What do we know now? What do we do first? How will we use this information going forward?
“Coaching through success and failure” refers to the practice of guiding an individual through both positive achievements (successes) and setbacks (failures). Each experience for employees is a learning opportunity to promote their growth and development, fostering resilience when change happens and leading to greater overall success – for the individual employees but also for the whole organisation.
Engage with your employees and show compassion
The work environment has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic and organisations embrace the challenges with the continuing hybrid-work model. There is no such thing as the “9-5 work culture” anymore. Whilst a healthy work-life balance is essential for everyone, the advancement in IT technologies means that it now blurs the line between personal and business communication.
Recognise the cultural shift signs and engagement
Despite increased IT connectivity, many organisations recognise the lack of employee engagement and attributed to the hybrid-work model with the reluctance of employees to return to committed structure with the “return-to-work” model. For increased engagement and cultural shift, employees need to visualise the following:
- Two-way communication and feedback with management.
- An ongoing Peer Feedback Program and regular Manager check-ins beyond their standard Performance Review cycle.
- Empathy in the workplace and organisation.
- Support in maintaining a healthy work-life balance for employees and with their personal commitments (the non-work areas) of their lives.
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reinforces organisational values
While Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) requires organisational buy-in, individual leaders can have influence and by spearheading initiatives that give voice to their employees. By listening to your staff and sharing their social concerns with your Executive Management Team, employees feel more invested and conscientious about the impact of their work more than ever before.
Leaders can proactively reinforce corporate values and avoid forced change by showing their teams how they are making an impact. When setting goals and objectives, shift your team’s focus beyond the “what” and the “how” to your corporate vision of “why”. Connecting individual tasks to the bigger picture shows your employees that the work they are doing matters. As a direct benefit, understanding “how” they fit into the puzzle typically results in higher levels of engagement and productivity.
Cultural alignment = your actions + your team’s perceptions
When Leaders execute their organisation’s business strategies, they cannot forget their organisation’s culture — the self-reinforcing structure of beliefs, practices, patterns, and behaviours — because culture trumps strategy every time!
Your organisation’s culture is aligned with the way things are done, and it is the way people interact, make decisions, and influence other stakeholders. Leaders’ own conscious and unconscious beliefs drive decisions and behaviours, and it is these repeated behaviours that become leadership practices. Because these internal practices eventually become the patterns of your organisation’s leadership culture, Leaders must understand their responsibility in creating — or changing the inertia and then the direction.
Understand the core and definition of leadership
As a Leader, you are at the core of your organisation’s culture. The actions that you take (no matter small or otherwise) can have a lasting impact on your employees morale, recruitment, and retention rates. Because your team are always watching, so make sure your actions and their perception of your actions are aligned. Cultural alignment and the trajectory of the organisation creates happy workers, who are more productive, and encourage cross-collaborative teamwork.
The type of organisational culture you have and how your organisation approaches and understands the definition of leadership, combined can dictate how successful your business strategies will be. Afterall, who doesn’t want their employees to perform better, be more resilient, but aligned to the future goals and objectives.
Summary
In the business world, mistakes are inevitable and the journey to success is often paved with disruptions and miscalculations. But what separates true leaders from the rest is not their ability to avoid mistakes, but their instinct for turning them into gradual steps for success. Simply, the option is not about making mistakes altogether — but it is about learning from your mistakes and rising stronger, wiser, and more resilient.
The role of the Leader of an innovative organisation must include helping people to learn and enabling them to take reasonable risks. Innovation requires experimentation, so encouraging your people to experiment and which often ends in failure (many times) before success can be achieved is critically important. When failure happens, the simple choices are whether to learn from it or to hide from it, covering up or laying the blame somewhere.
That is why the examples set by leadership is critical because learning from failure can help you consistently improve as a Leader. By self-learning from failure, you will (hopefully) avoid making the same mistake again and your confidence increases as you to continue to experiment. The failure is not the mistake or experiment itself – it is when people and the organisations they work in, do not functionally learn from the experience gained.
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