Failure?

What if you created a culture within your organization where failure is accepted, acknowledged, and celebrated? If failure were not a shameful or blameful act would you and your people take more risks? Would you be more innovative?

Imagine the possibilities within a culture where leaning in, contributing the full range of your gifts and talents, and risking failure is what is expected of you? A culture where everyone plays big for the sake of achieving the mission in bigger and better ways than you had allowed yourself to imagine.

This is part 5 of the 5-part series on Leadership Resilience by Diana Gabriel, Certified Strengths Strategy Coach.

You cannot learn from your failures when the emphasis is on blaming and shaming. Click To Tweet

Admittedly, some failures are more costly than others. As a leader, do you make it safe for people to report and admit to failures?

Harvard management professor Amy Edmondson delineates a “spectrum of reasons for failure” in “Strategies for Learning from Failure” (Harvard Business Review, April 2011), as summarized here:

1. Deviance
An individual chooses to violate a prescribed process or practice.

2. Inattention
An individual inadvertently deviates from specifications.

3. Lack of Ability
An individual doesn’t have the skills, conditions or training to execute a job.

4. Process Inadequacy
A competent individual adheres to a prescribed, but faulty or incomplete, process.

5. Task Challenge
An individual faces a task too difficult to be executed reliably every time.

6. Process Complexity
A process composed of many elements breaks down when it encounters novel interactions.

7. Uncertainty
A lack of clarity about future events causes people to take seemingly reasonable actions that produce undesired results.

8. Hypothesis Testing
An experiment conducted to prove that an idea or a design would succeed actually fails.

9. Exploratory Testing
An experiment conducted to expand knowledge and investigate a possibility leads to undesired results.

Notice how this spectrum progresses from failures that are intentional or conscious to those that could be considered unintentional and could actually be praiseworthy. 

How many of the failures in your organization are truly intentional? Compare this to how many are treated as intentional, and you understanding better why so many failures go unreported.

You cannot learn from your failures when the emphasis is on blaming and shaming. You do not have the opportunity to learn to become more resilient when your energy is tied up in assigning or avoiding blame.

Perhaps Procter & Gamble’s A. G. Lafley said it best in his Harvard Business Review interview:

“I think I learned more from my failures than from my successes in all my years as a CEO. I think of my failures as a gift. Unless you view them that way, you won’t learn from failure, you won’t get better—and the company won’t get better.”

What about you? Do you learn more from failure or success? I’d love to hear from you, leave a comment.