“In business trivializing yesterday’s failures will hinder tomorrow’s progress.”

In business it’s quite common to quickly forget your failures yet remember every detail when it comes to successes, no matter how trivial they were. Remembering failure is very unpleasant because it hits you where it hurts the most in business, your ego. Thinking through failures and evaluating “what happened” rocks your confidence and, very often, forces you to re-evaluate your leadership style or thought process. Clearly it takes you out of your comfort zone. This is precisely why taking the time to self-evaluate failure is so very important as a leader. In fact, it’s your obligation and you owe it to your team.

Your professional growth as a leader never stops unless you choose to stop learning and listening. In fact, failure to grow as a leader has very little to do with your supervisor, outside influences or colleagues. It is true that a very good supervisor can accelerate your professional growth or provide you with the foundation necessary to excel.  However, at the end of the day YOU, as an individual, must decide whether you want to embrace change and learn or remain status quo and fall behind. Professional growth is tied directly to the choices you make as a professional.

A choice a quality leader must always make is to review failure with an open mind. Certainly, one must also review successes, but that’s typically a pleasant activity. When reviewing failure, a leader must ask himself or herself some very tough questions such as…

-         Was the failure a result of my poor thought process?

-         Did I not take the time to collect all the facts?

-         Was I too impatient and failed to consult my leadership team or get their opinion?

-         Did I understand the risk versus reward associated with failure?

-         Did I communicate the plan with my team adequately?

The honest answers to these and many more questions could “rock your confidence”. However, it’s this honesty that will feed your professional growth, as long as you don’t forget what you learned. Never trivialize a failure or poor decision as everyone fails at some point. It’s how you handle that failure that will separate you from the rest. Did you learn from your failure? Will you call upon your learnings the next time you are confronted with a similar situation, or will you make the same mistake over and over again? It’s inevitable that a similar issue will no doubt arise at some point during your career. This is precisely why “trivializing yesterday’s failures will often hinder tomorrow’s progress”.

Here’s a simple best practice that I have found useful throughout my career. Keep a personalized digital log outlining some failures, successes or tough decisions you had to make throughout your career. Keep it simple. 

-         Briefly outline the circumstance (I would always omit names – respect privacy)

-         What steps did you take to address the issue?

-         Was the outcome successful? Was the outcome a failure?

-         List a few “key takeaways”

-         What would you do differently next time?

When you have some quite time during a business flight or your sitting in a hotel room review your log. Over time you’ll have a very good “personalized learning tool” that you can call upon throughout your career. This simple practice will help you as you find yourself challenged with tough decisions. Very often the stress of a situation can cloud your thought process. Keeping a log will help you remain focused.

Remember, never trivialize yesterday’s failures as they will almost always hinder tomorrow’s progress. 

As always, I hope you found this article useful. Best of luck in your career! -MC