Founder and Chief Culture Officer of Ideal Outcomes, Inc. Author of the new book Culture Ignited: 5 Disciplines for Adaptive Leadership.
I was staring failure in the face. It was early in my career, and I’d accepted a position to lead a sales team of 12 people. For the first four quarters, I drove double-digit growth. Then, the fifth and sixth quarters plateaued. We were heading in the wrong direction. I was so confident of success, and now we were failing. I couldn’t figure out why.
My business coach and mentor came in and spent four days interviewing all the sales and admin people as well as other managers and leaders within the company. On a Friday morning, he sat in my office and flipped through a notepad full of his research. There was silence as he dropped the notepad to the ground and told me, “Jason, nobody likes you.”
Digging deeper into the cause of my failure was the realization that instead of leading and developing people, I’d been pulling and dragging them along. Our sales growth was happening because of my personal capabilities, but it had run out of steam because the team wasn’t behind me.
That morning, I made a fundamental shift and focused thereafter on coaching and continuous performance management. By the seventh quarter, we were back on an upward trajectory. Failure comes in many forms but can be a catalyst for success.
Sir James Dyson is a classic example. He went through 5,126 prototypes over four years as he strove to develop a bagless vacuum. His 5,127th attempt using cyclone technology worked, sparking the growth of a multi-billion-dollar company.
Look at Steve Jobs and Apple. Does anyone know of The Lisa, its personal computer that was one of the first to offer a graphical user interface (GUI)? Innovative, yet a commercial flop due to its high price tag and software compatibility challenges. But it laid the foundation for the launch of the ubiquitous Apple Macintosh.
Sara Blakely learned all about rejection when she sold fax machines door to door. Friends and family laughed when they discovered the product she’d been secretly developing for a year was Spanx. She went on to become the youngest self-made woman on Forbes’s “World’s Billionaires” list.
Failure is an inevitable part of the business landscape, and embracing and learning from mistakes can turn failure into success. Here’s how.
Lessons Learned
Every prototype that doesn’t work, every product launch that flops, and every idea that’s mocked can all be valuable learning experiences that can lead to course corrections. You identify what doesn’t work and recalibrate. As Lori Greiner of Shark Tank fame says, “Failures are lessons to help you get better, smarter, and stronger. I’m a firm believer that we can learn from everything we do and continue to move forward.”
Failure builds resilience.
Facing failure, tackling it head-on and overcoming it builds strength and resilience that is invaluable for any organization. Companies that have steered their way through downturns and disasters are better positioned to handle future challenges. The Covid-19 pandemic was the greatest challenge that most companies have ever faced. Like many organizations, we kept going and kept servicing our clients. We switched from in-person training to online training as quickly as we could. Everyone made financial sacrifices to keep the company alive. We came through it and, through resilience, are thriving more than ever.
Persistence pays.
Don’t give up at the first hurdle. Grit and determination play a big role in overcoming obstacles every entrepreneur is bound to encounter. I have a colleague who likes to say, “No problems, no business.”
Embrace failure.
Embrace your failures as a stepping stone in boosting creativity. Use them to rethink product development and as a way to refocus the efforts of yourself and your team. Sara Blakely credits her father for the fact she had no fear of failure. At the dinner table, he’d ask her and her brother on a weekly basis what they’d failed at and be disappointed if they had nothing to report. He’d high-five a failure and have them explore what had happened. Accepting failure as part of the entrepreneurial journey can encourage risk-taking and, thereby, innovation.
Failure can make you more humble and empathetic.
Failure can bring giant-size egos down to earth. And while it can be humbling, it should foster the development of more rounded, empathetic leadership skills that, in turn, lead to collaborative, problem-solving teams that go on to iterate improvements. Such empathy can foster a more inclusive and understanding work culture and better relationships with partners and stakeholders.
Years ago, I moved to Australia for a business opportunity full of ideas and optimism but encountered resistance to the American “interloper.” I came to understand the Australian culture, relate to its people, and turned adversity into an advantage.
Final Thoughts
Harvard Professor and author Amy Edmondson recommends what she calls “intelligent failure,” in which a person or business takes the kinds of calculated risks that can deliver great rewards. If you’re not regularly employing this, you’re probably not operating at your full potential.
Remember that every setback offers a new opportunity for growth. As long as entrepreneurs learn lessons from what went wrong and don’t repeat the same mistakes, today’s failure might very well be the springboard for tomorrow’s triumph.
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