The F-Word – How to Use Failure to Create Success

Students fear it will shatter their hopes of getting into top universities. First-time startup founders worry it will destroy their professional dreams. Within their first 10 years, less than 30% of business ventures will survive, so it should be no surprise that people dread the “f-word” in business — failure.??

Perfectionism in the next generation of leaders is higher than ever, but too much of a focus on being perfect leads to fear and inaction. Fear of failure can impact a business leader's decisions and the tasks they undertake in their process. When people become too afraid to put anything out into the world that might be imperfect, they miss valuable opportunities – a phenomenon researcher, academic, and author Brene Brown calls "life paralysis.” But failure is necessary for learning and innovation and is an “essential prerequisite” for success.?

Here’s how to transform failure from a four-letter word into a company strength:

Hire leaders with diverse experience?

Instead of looking for leadership with a long history in the same career, broaden the scope to non-conventional backgrounds and career paths. Leaders who have explored various industries and grown diverse companies bring valuable new insights and perspectives. Their ability to pivot and demonstrate leadership in diverse careers demonstrates a consistent desire to learn, seek out new opportunities, and lead through change and disruption. In each new career, they had to fail to learn how to succeed and leaders like that can set the example of accepting failure for the rest of the company.

Consider failures as a key hiring ingredient

Incorporate an evaluation of a candidate's experiences with failure as an integral part of hiring. The seemingly “perfect” candidate who is unable to admit to any failures may be overly critical of themselves and too stuck in their “life paralysis” to risk tarnishing their reputation with failure for the chance at driving company success. As Mark Zuckerburg tells employees at Facebook, “‘Move fast and break things,’ [because] if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.” Ask candidates about their past failures and how they learned from them. Make it clear to candidates that everyone at the company accepts failure as a part of learning, growth, and innovation.?

Bake risk and failure into company success

Encourage employee exploration and leaps of faith, even at the risk of failure. Risk is the essence of innovation because it disrupts predictable outcomes, so reward risk-taking instead of punishing it. An employee's willingness to take a risk and potentially fail demonstrates their dedicated commitment to learning, but that comes from the example set by leadership. Leaders can build a culture of trust around risk and the potential for failure by taking that first risk. Include failure assessments in leadership evaluations and bake failure into the company objectives. Track key failures and how the next steps changed because of the lessons learned from them.

To find success, most leaders first find failure. But then they learn from their mistakes and try again, with better insights into how to do it right the next time. Leaders should seek to reframe failure from the “f-word” no one wants to mention into an integral part of growth and development in our personal and professional lives. By embracing and promoting failure as a necessary part of that process, we drive innovation and company success.?

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Tom Popomaronis is Executive Vice President of Innovation at Massive Alliance, a global executive branding agency. Tom co-founded Massive's Executive Leadership Branding program – which transforms world-class executives into contributing authors at leading publications.

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