As President and CEO at FinDec, Michael excels at mentoring people and guiding them through difficult situations.
The negative consequences of failure in the business world can be catastrophic, but I’m a glass-half-full kind of leader, and I believe that falling short of goals can be beneficial to the health of an organization. Our tolerance for failure, our definition of it and our reaction to it can all be leveraged to enhance our work and make us better leaders.
The pass/fail structure of our education system—you either answered the questions correctly or you didn’t—has significantly influenced our definition of success and failure. Unfortunately, this either/or model doesn’t fit into our lived reality.
My service in the military and law enforcement gave me a different perspective on success and failure. Wars are won despite individual failed missions that result in the loss of life. Is this truly success? When a police officer stops a perpetrator from killing someone, has the officer failed because the victim was hurt in the process or succeeded because the victim didn’t die?
Moving away from the pass/fail model can ease stress and improve systems that can prevent failures. This leads to stronger organizations and the enhanced well-being of employees. Below are a few strategies that have worked for me.
1. Focus on the journey, not the endgame.
No one starts their day intending to fail, yet perfection is frankly unrealistic.
Simply checking off your task list doesn’t mean you attained 100% success on each of the intentions. Perhaps you set out to make three successful sales calls. You made three, but did they generate the amount you expected? If not, did you succeed or fail? Does a basketball team consider their win a success when they came back from a 20-point deficit and missed 70% of free-throws?
Adjusting your lens on failure, as well as modifying your definition of success, will enable you to approach goals first by examining how you will reach them.
In the Army, we worked backwards, thinking about every step that is needed to get to the endgame. If a goal is missed, you can’t change the outcome, but you can go back and analyze the steps that led to the unintended result.
Perhaps reworking your sales pitch or re-defining your target market will make tomorrow’s sales calls more successful. Extra free-throw drills will prepare the team for a better performance next week. When individual systems are performing well, you mitigate the risk of larger issues arising or overall goals being missed.
2. Keep emotions in check.
It's natural to react emotionally when mistakes are made, but I’ve learned from my previous training that it's most productive to keep emotions in check to focus on the present.
Emotions limit your capability to handle the situation, and since you can’t change what happened, you need to let rationale, not emotions, drive your decisions on how to move forward.
Stay calm. Get the facts. Deal with what you can control.
3. Look under the hood.
Look under the hood. What were the steps that led to this outcome? Were expectations clearly communicated? Did you set that employee up for success? Did they have the capacity and skills to achieve the desired outcome? And most importantly, is there something else going on with the employee that may have caused this error?
When it comes to leadership, it is in this mission to determine cause that we learn more about our employees, processes and opportunities that will hopefully prevent an error from repeating itself and, in turn, make our organization better.
My mentorship approach to leadership guides me during these situations. I like to ask one question, “What is going on?” and then I listen. Inevitably, the employee will reveal a nugget about something at home that is causing stress or an organizational process that is flawed.
4. Create an open-door policy.
Another way to mitigate mistakes is to develop and encourage a culture in which employees know from Day 1 that open communication is valued.
During onboarding, we share the rationale behind our open-door policy, that we value excellence, and we realize humans make mistakes. If something isn’t going well, we want employees to feel comfortable proactively sharing concerns so that we can address issues before they become a crisis.
By developing a culture where vulnerability is applauded, we allow people to be human, to feel comfortable asking for help.
To be clear, this approach is not about promoting failure as acceptable behavior, and you shouldn't completely remove consequences. Tools such as personal improvement plans allow you to partner with employees to make improvements.
You'll find value in creating an environment where people are not walking on eggshells in constant fear that they will be terminated if they admit they are struggling or if they make a mistake. Mitigating a crisis is far less costly than addressing one.
5. Accept failure and the good that accompanies it.
We are tough on ourselves professionally. We are measured against KPIs, performance reviews and data. We care about what our colleagues think, and we don’t want to be seen as not carrying our weight.
Not wanting to fail is part of being human, but so is failing. Failure has led to a multitude of discoveries. It builds analytical skills by forcing us to pick apart what went wrong and figure out new systems or improve current processes. It makes us nimbler and more vulnerable, which can improve our relationships and increase self-esteem.
Leaders are charged with innovating. Innovating involves risk. Risk invites failure. Failure leads to growth. Leave some space for failure in your professional and personal life. Embrace it as an opportunity to improve, and most importantly, give others the grace to do the same.