Three Don ts in Dealing with Failure


Three Don’ts in Dealing with Failure

Humiliation and embarrassment hamper our capacity to learn. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that many leaders don’t think straight or learn much after they’ve made mistakes or suffered setbacks. In fact, they typically react in one of the following ways, and we’d like to alert you to what they are and how to avoid them:

  1. Don’t let failure define you as a person. We’ve seen highly talented, fast-track leaders derailed by a single failure. In many instances, this happens when people internalize failure rather than separate the event from who they are. Even if you made a stupid mistake, you aren’t stupid. Recognize that anyone who works long enough will experience a significant failure at least once in his career. The worst thing you can do is dwell on the failure, running it through your mind again and again, second-guessing yourself and beating yourself up for whatever mistake you made (or think you made). After acknowledging the failure and accepting responsibility, you need to let go of it and move on. Put your mistake in perspective—this is a natural, predictable part of any career—and refuse to allow it to dominate how you lead.

    In the past few years, we have worked with a number of former partners of the failed accounting firm Arthur Andersen. The vast majority of global partners played no role in the firm’s demise and were only witnesses and not participants in the collapse of a great company with which so many were identified and committed. However, the range of reactions on the part of senior leaders demonstrated the importance of perspective. Those with the ability to separate their role in Andersen from their identity as a successful and competent professional were able to quickly move on to other opportunities and become successful again. Unfortunately, others personalized the experience for no good reason and became stranded, literally and figuratively, in their careers.

  2. Don’t seek scapegoats. Realistically and naturally, most leaders who fail in a big way react defensively. Corporations may give lip service to failure being a good learning experience but, in most instances, corporations treat failure brutally. There is so much pressure on organizations for performance that relatively few companies can forgive or forget failure easily. At the same time, if you respond defensively you’re likely to waste this teachable moment. If you blame your team or anyone else for the setback, you’re not likely to examine your role in the failure. You may convince yourself that you had nothing to do with the problem when, in fact, you helped cause it. And even if you bore no direct responsibility for the failure, blaming others discourages self-examination and the acceptance of responsibility—two critical leadership traits. Resist this blaming reflex and instead absorb the blame. This doesn’t mean saying mea culpa for everything that occurred under your leadership. You don’t want to further deepen your predicament by dwelling on all the things you did wrong. There are gracious ways of accepting responsibility for failure. You can admit what you did wrong, explain the context for the mistake, and make a commitment not to let it happen again; you can demonstrate that you’ve learned a lesson that you will apply in future situations.

  3. Don’t limit your thinking to the event itself. Yes, it’s important to learn from what went wrong and act differently if the same circumstances present themselves in the future. Significant failure, however, is an opportunity for internal, as well as external, learning. Ask yourself what it says about you as a leader that you did X instead of Y. Consider how your approach or values may have caused you to contribute to the failure. In many ways, it’s easier to look at failure from an external perspective; you can define exactly what you should know or do in the future. An internal perspective is more difficult. It relates to who you are, not only as a leader but as a person. Did your arrogance contribute to the failure? Was your mercurial nature a contributing cause?




Leadership Passages. The Personal and Professional Transitions That Make or Break a Leader
Leadership Passages: The Personal and Professional Transitions That Make or Break a Leader (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership)
ISBN: 0787974277
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 121

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