Leadership Tip #5: Embrace failure – especially your own

By Richard J. Crespin

No matter how much we’ve progressed, trial-and-error is still the best and only teacher when dealing with truly new things. Yes, you can avoid the mistakes of others by studying what they’ve done, but that also means your treading old turf.

When striking off into the unknown – and if you’re doing something truly innovative you’re off in unchartered waters – you will need to learn by trial-and-error. To encourage the rational risk taking that will drive innovation you will need to accept failure as not just a consequence but as an indicator of progress.

This does not mean it’s time to experiment wildly. These times should focus you and bring a keen sight to your endeavors. You need to couple experimentation with rigorous criteria (see Leadership Tip #6: Impose clear criteria) and a deliberate approach to learning from mistakes. Consider using an approach like the US Army’s After Action Review Process.

The Army is probably one of the world's largest hierarchical and bureaucratic organizations, yet when it comes to training it has managed to flatten itself out and become more of a horizontal organization. By performing After Action Reviews (AAR) after a training activity, it turns it into a learning process that involves all the participants, from the lowest-ranking soldiers to commanders to interested outsiders and observers. It focuses on the tasks and goals to discover why things happen. . . never to judge success or failure. An AAR is perhaps one of the ultimate performance improvement tools because it encourages all stakeholders to share and learn in order to have continuous improvement. (Sources: Department of the Army (1993). A Leaders Guide To After Action Review (TC 25-20) and Big Dog & Little Dog’s Performance Juxtaposition Web site, After Action Reviews.)

Don’t just study failure, embrace it. That means learning from it and that means ruthlessly shutting down failed investments – though not the people involved. One of the cardinal mistakes leaders make in these environments is to equate the failure of an endeavor with the personal failure of the people involved. If being associated with a failed project harbingers career-doom, then people won’t take risks. If people are allowed to live to fight another day then colleagues see that you can take smart risks and still hold on to your job even when those risks sometimes don’t pay off.

This is not an excuse for avoiding tough personnel decisions. If it’s the people that caused the failure, then everyone needs to recognize that and deal with it; even if that means terminating the individuals’ employment.