How Failures Lead to Success
Google launched the Google Glasses in 2012, after two years the product was canceled due to low sales. In 2014, Amazon launched the Fire Phone. Just a little over a year after the launch, Amazon discontinued the device and took a loss of $170 million. Both Amazon and Google invest heavily into hundreds of products they know will most likely fail. Why is that? Because the few products that do become successful will drive most of the company’s revenue and success in the market place. These companies are intentionally embracing failures to learn, to try new products/services, and to explore new markets. In fact, leaders of these company track their failure rates and if this rate is not high enough, it’s a signal to them and the team that they are not taking enough risk.
Why Should We Embrace Failure?
Often our view on failure and success is skewed towards famous stories of outlandish success. The thing we do not often look at too closely is the number of failures it took to get to that success. Partly, that is because in our work place, only success is celebrated, discussed, and promoted. We are not rewarded for taking a risk to try something new or learn something new unless it results in qualitative accomplishment. On top of these types of work cultures and expectations, we have a natural fear of failure. We cannot see how we will recover if we failed. In holding these views and belief, what we often miss in our perception and in these mindsets is that we also do not learn or grow without failing. For example, have you observed a baby learning to walk? It is a process of learning to stand and then fall, and then learning to take a few steps and then falling, and then finally some coordination sticks and you have a baby that’s walking. In this process of failure, the baby’s brain is learning what works and what doesn’t work. The baby never gives up though because each time it gets back up is an opportunity to walk and then eventually run. When we maintain this beginner mindset, we can also embrace learning through our falls.
One Caveat
There are fields and areas of life where the ultimate accuracy is needed and desired. Some of these areas include banking (we all want our bank accounts to accurately reflect what we have in the account), aviation (we want pilots to safely and accurately get us to our destinations), health care (we want our physicians to accurately diagnose us), etc. In these environments, often it is not about trying new things (when current models are working at relatively high accuracy), it is about creating transparent environments where mistakes or errors can be reported. If there are severe negative consequences for reporting errors or mistakes, often times, there will be a lack of reporting of such occurrences. Therefore, it is important to create work environments that still allow for vulnerability to report errors, failures, or mistakes as these accurate reports can lead to improvements in the future and allow leaders to better evaluate processes, frameworks, and systems.
Leadership’s Role in Fostering Growth
Leaders play a crucial role in promoting exploration and growth through learning and failure. It is up to our leaders to recognize when someone on our team is stepping out of their comfort zone to learn something new or take on a role they do not have much experience in and allow some room for failure. These environments nurture experimentation, honesty, collaboration, and lessons learned that would otherwise not be possible. To create this type of environment, leaders should be aware of their own tolerance of failure.
Leadership Self-Reflection
How have you handled failure in the past?
Reflect on the aftermath of failure in your career or team. What valuable lessons did you learn?
What steps can you take to be more tolerant of failure when trying new things?
How can you foster a culture where team members feel encouraged to explore new methods without fear of punishment for failure?
Lead by Example: Share Failures
Opening up about personal failures is a powerful leadership tool. By sharing your own experiences, you create a safe space for your team to embrace failure as a natural part of the learning process. Sharing your lessons learned and how you recovered from a setback also shows your team that out of taking a risk, we can take away valuable lessons that we apply to future situations whether we succeed or fail.
Adopting a Dinner Table Approach: Celebrating Failure
Sarah Blakely, founder of Spanx, often discusses that her Dad would ask everyone at dinner what they failed at that day. This discussion was to encourage his kids to take risks and try something new. When no failures were reported for the day, her Dad reported being disappointed. In the Blakey household, failures were celebrated because it meant that the individual tried something new and stepped out of their comfort zone. Consider implementing a practice where team members openly discuss their daily failures. This encourages a positive mindset towards taking risks and trying new approaches. This also opens up a discussion on what we can learn and how we can try a new approach.
Conclusion
In conclusion, failures help us to learn, grow, and try new things that often lead to success. Leaders should encourage transparency with teams about failures and encourage experimentation. Start with you, share your own failures to demonstrate that it is a safe environment and encourage your team to celebrate failures and discuss lessons learned and how the team can approach things differently the next time.
