This is article one in a series of seven. Click here to explore the other deadly sins of leadership.
Definition
The dictionary definition of failure is “lack of success”. Writing that makes me smile — failure is so awkward that it has to be defined by the absence of something else :-)
Owning a failure (my definition) is a process with four parts:
- Acknowledging the failure. This is usually the hardest part.
- Dispassionately analysing the failure to understand it — ask why five times.
- Working out what could be done differently to avoid the failure in future — this is where you start to turn failure into success.
- Taking actions which will prevent the same failure occurring again.
Failure through a human lens
Success and… the lack of it… are part of the human experience, present wherever objectives are attempted. Every time a board game is played, a new year’s resolution is set or a new role is taken on, the risk of failure is present alongside the potential rewards of success. Challenges ranging from putting a man on the moon to keeping a bedroom tidy play out through a mix of success and failure.
Interestingly, our tolerance of failure changes over time.
Babies have a remarkable resilience to failure, making thousands of attempts to pull theirself from the floor, balance and take their first step. Learning to talk is a similar process of trial and error: repeated failures with the occasional euphoria of success (think of Mum’s response the first time a baby says “mama”).
However by the time we reach teenage years and adulthood, accepting failure has become harder. Not making the team or being turned down for a new job can really hurt. Being told that you made a mistake can trigger anger and denial. Even acknowledging that you haven’t done as well as you hoped on something small like staying in touch with an old friend can be difficult.
Why we become less resilient to failure is too complex to cover in this post (changes in the brain, ego and group status all play a part), but the point is that when someone in a leadership position falls into the trap of not owning their failures, trouble is not far behind.
Why does it matter?
To understand why not owning failure is a problem, consider again the example of a baby learning to walk. Babies do not learn to walk by copying an adult — they learn through their mistakes, experimenting to discover what works and what does not. Not embracing failure would mean… never walking.
Framed as an opportunity to learn then, failures which are not embraced and dissected are a missed opportunity to learn. Furthermore, not learning means falling behind other people and organisations who actively embrace the learning opportunity. Examples of how learning from failure can drive positive outcomes abound in many arenas, from the approach to learning in schools (why we should embrace mistakes in school), to the Scientific Method which relies on the success and failure of experiments, to companies like Google and Amazon who rely on experimentation to grow and innovate.
Henry Ford fell into this trap with his Model T after the great depression, refusing to acknowledge that his single model, single colour (black) Model T was losing market share because it didn’t meet customer needs any more: in his words, “It takes you there, and it brings you back”. Meanwhile General Motors were learning from Mr Ford’s mistake and claimed the dominant position in the market by producing a differentiated range of makes and models to allow Americans to showcase their status in public.
A famous definition of insanity (commonly misattributed to Albert Einstein) is
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Not owning failure leads you down this road of insanity — if you don’t acknowledge and learn from mistakes, you are doomed to repeat yourself or at best, blindly cast around. Consider Yahoo, who despite many inspired acquisitions repeatedly made the mistake of being second best in an area. Tom Parker, Yahoo Alumni: “We were like Eratosthenes, whose nickname was Beta because he was second best at everything he tried. That was Yahoo. We had a few core products like mail that were best in class, but most of our products were second best”. Yahoo plummeted from being from the most valuable company in the world in the year 2000 to being sold off to Verizon in 2016 for just 4% of their former value.
The damage does not stop there though — other negative side effects typically follow. People are intelligent and when they see a group or individual not owning a failure, credibility in that group or individual is eroded. It is impossible to lead effectively when you lack credibility with your team, i.e. when they don’t believe in you.
In the absence of critical appraisal of successes and failures, a low-value “celebrate outputs” culture may emerge, sometimes known as success theatre. As an example of this, I once witnessed a company-wide email celebrating a tweak to the appearance of a button — a change which I am confident had zero impact on the business.
Finally, not owning failures sends an implicit message that failing is not OK. And that is the gateway to a whole world of hurt.
There is a mantra in startups to “fail early, fail often” which guides behaviour — teams are expected to rapidly experiment, learn, tweak and experiment again and it is expected that many of the experiments will be failures. The context of course is that keeping failures small and quick means more opportunities to experiment and learn and therefore a greater chance of long-term success.
On the flip side, when failure is seen as a misstep which may be punished the incentive becomes to avoid failure at all costs. That failure avoidance will be manifested in a swathe of creative ways, from hushing it up to prioritising mistake avoidance over speed and creativity. In this environment, experimentation and creativity will evaporate and the chances of long-term success will fall.
Spotting it in the wild
- When failures occur they are not discussed openly.
- Positive language is used to camouflage failure as success.
- Very similar ideas are tried again and again, with very similar results. This can happen even at the very highest level of a company, with repeated similar “strategic bets” each of which cost millions to deliver.
- There tends to be an established way of doing everything that is rarely challenged.
- As a result, innovation and creativity are absent.
- When something goes wrong, blame is quickly handed out.
- Meaningful retrospectives and continuous improvement do not happen.
Remedy
- Be confident enough to lead by example and share your own failures with the team. This is not a sign of weakness — it is a sign of great strength.
- Share inspirational examples of people who embraced failure and ultimately achieved breakout success.
Thomas Eddison, the inventor of the electric lightbulb who has more than 1,000 patents in his name, had this to say about failure:
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”.
- Develop a culture of safety across your teams — show by your words and actions that when failures happen you will support the team to resolve the problem and you will never blame them.
- Use retrospectives to objectively examine mistakes and learn from them. Then take action based on those learnings.
- If you want more, Harvard Business Review published a set of strategies that should help
Not to be confused with
- Resilience: the ability to own mistakes, learn from them and keep pushing forward. Many incredibly successful individuals navigated multiple failures during their career.
- Maintaining a belief that you will succeed no matter how bleak your situation — the Stockdale Paradox. Learn more about the incredible stoicism of Admiral James Stockdale here.
