Dealing with Failure in Business Development
"Failure is the condiment that gives success it's flavour" - Truman Capote
I heard a fascinating story on the radio the other day as I was driving to a meeting and it struck a useful chord. It was about how we give ourselves a hard time when we fail.
I was actually on my way to a client where one of their deal teams had lost a major bid a few months earlier and they were struggling to gain traction on a new bid. I was able to use what I had heard to position dealing with failure slightly differently than I had planned.
As a parent, we always try to be smart - we want our kids to be successful and as part of life lessons we need to instil appropriate disciplines, we want our kids to know right from wrong and how to be a good person - and to learn why these things are important and hopefully achieve what they want in life.
The radio story went something like this (no notes - I was driving).
For many people growing up, the naughty step was a sacred place - it's where we were sent to ponder our wrong-doings. For many families, the age of the child can dictate how many minutes they spend on the naughty step - a five year old will certainly know how long five minutes is!
Quite rightly, when the time is served, it's all forgotten and we move on again, hopefully a little wiser for the knowledge gained.
It just seems to work.
In our personal or business lives, when we misjudge a situation or make a mistake we should simply go to our naughty step and ponder - understand what we did wrong and how we can ensure we do not make that same mistake again. We screwed up - we just need to get over it.
Unfortunately there are no naughty steps for a 40 or 50 something to sit on (even though the prospect of almost an hour sitting alone in silence sounds particularly appealing to most busy people). Getting over things is sometimes incredibly challenging as we are faced with failure - and the more mature we are, the more experienced or senior we are the harder failure can be to deal with.
Many people, when they screw up, tend to beat themselves up for days, weeks or even months at a time for mistakes they made and from which there may be no easy recovery - so the only true value can be in the learning, and that was probably gained within that first thoughtful hour of reflection.
For my clients deal team - ok, so they lost a deal. They made some mistakes and they paid the price. Unfortunately, they have allowed that failure to fester, to impact the way they think about this new opportunity - their confidence was low and their ability to work effectively was severely compromised. I worked with them to put things into context - they were high achievers who had reacted badly to failure. They did not know how to face their colleagues. They had to forgive themselves, learn from the mistakes and move on. This allowed them to reset, be better for the experience and be more determined to succeed next time round. The exercises we executed demonstrated to themselves just how good they were and why they should not doubt their abilities.
We can all lose something valuable, upset a friend or colleague, disappoint a client or family member - we are only human, we are expected to screw up from time to time. How we approach this failure, our ability to forgive ourselves and move on is a valuable asset if we are to fix the problem. It's not about the failure, it's about recognising it, facing up to it, being honest, realistic, in context - and then moving on.
Most people are forgiving, so get over it! After all, we are all supposed to be smarter than a five year-old.
(This is a repost of an earlier post under a different title by request)