Managing Failures- An under rated virtue !

There was a quote I read sometime back and it caught my fancy. 

It read like this “No human ever became interesting without failing. The more you fail and recover, the better you become as a person”.

Not that this was the first quote I was reading on failure but what struck me most about these lines was that how subtly it only talked about the interplay of failure and recovery without attaching much value to any further outcomes like success (post failure). It essentially spoke about a process of learning, doing and becoming better (may be not the best). It didn’t qualify this process with success as an eventual outcome. It only talked about recovery (bouncing back) and being better (continuous improvement).

Now, I don’t want you to mistake me here. I have no problem with success as an outcome. Success is great. We must strive for it. For most of us in commercial organisations, success forms a critical evaluation parameter too. The only problem occurs when we start attaching inordinate consequential value to either of success or failure as an outcome. This problem further compounds since thanks to our social conditioning, the value that we attach to success is invariably far more than the value we attach to failure.

As a society, on social media, in our personal circles, professional circles, we rarely see people talk about their failures, unless they have reached a stage in life/ career where the failure stories become learnings for others. 

Now, Why is it so difficult for us to talk about failure without camouflaging it or topping it up with a followup success story ? And forget about social media, it’s understandable that one may not be comfortable to share vulnerabilities with the lesser known audience but the problem complicates when we are unable to talk about our failures even within our closed circles, in confines of our homes, in front of our family and friends. Such inability could affect mental health thereby triggering further negative outcomes for the society at large. 

The above scenario have started to play out more lately due to the pandemic and changing economic, social, and psychological situations around us. 

Personally, I have always found immense learning in failing. I think failure is great and we must encourage people to talk about their failures and learning. 

In the current situation, as we begin to possibly fail more in professional setup, as organizations, as governments, as law and order custodians, as parents, as spouses, as probably a whole humankind, Let’s talk about these failures with as much ease as we talk about our successes. Let’s not lose hope. Because after all failure is a measure of having tried something in the first place. Not for a moment should we stop endeavoring for success but Let’s not shy away from admitting that we tried and failed.. and it’s OK to fail sometimes.

As I wear multiple hats of a professional, a parent, a spouse, a daughter each day.. I deliberate on what failure & dealing with it means to me as an individual and a professional:

As an individual and a parent: 

I guess it’s important to indulge our children into sports. Sports prepare us for losing. It’s a great leveler. You can enter the game by chance, contacts etc but you can largely remain there if you up your game, not by anything else. If you don’t perform, you lose. And sports are very brutal in calling out failure. It doesn’t camouflage failure as corporate performance evaluations like meets expectations, exceeds expectations or such other nice sounding scales. It tells you point blank whether you won or lost. So sports teaches you to lose very early in life and exposes you to the reality that you can indeed fail. Anyone can fail. And it’s ok to fail. So indulge children in sports and let them fail. Let them get used to this virtue. It prepares them well for the life ahead. 

As a professional: (purely my personal views and nothing to do with my current or past organizations)

Think of our selection processes where all that an applicant talks about is the successful assignments undertaken and even if one talk about failures, it’s quickly covered with a dash of “oh, but I learnt from it and next time I was successful, you know”.. applicants don’t want to admit that they failed without succeeding anytime soon. That’s considered a wrong thing to say in an interview. But to my mind, persistence and passion (performing despite failures) are as much important constituents to look for in an individual as are his accomplishments. That’s because those are the individuals who stand ground during tough times. 

Somewhere I feel our education system and hiring methods also play an important role here. Mostly organizations today hire from Ivy league Education institutions where we mostly find students with top notch academic accomplishments, many of them come from affluent families having witnessed little or no hardships in life.. I am not trying to stereotype any method or institution but it is possible that when such hires who have not seen many troughs enter corporations, they find it difficult to deal with rejections at work. Hard reviews by managers, daily tasking on targets, early setbacks with low productivity etc may take a toll on such people’s self worth leading to disengagement and possible attrition.. This happens because somewhere our academic curriculum fail to prepare our children on life skills. 

This is precisely where the concepts of Emotional quotient, social quotient and adversity quotient comes into play (Read about adversity quotient lately and resonated well with the concept). There is indeed a need of nurturing these quotients more so in the times we are treading currently. It is important to be aware of self and others’ emotions. It is important to build meaningful social networks beyond tasks. 

I do hope that as we go through this pandemic, we learn to harness the power of managing failures and come out as better individuals, better organizations, better law enforcers, better parents, better spouses and most importantly a better mankind...... continuously improving and evolving for the good !!