Turning Major Failures into Leadership Success

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THERE ARE FAILURES, AND THERE ARE… FAILURES!

A lot's been written and said over the years about the necessary role that failure plays in our quest for success. Anyone who's ever been successful first had to endure and bounce back from some kind of failure. It's easy to reduce this process to a few pithy sayings, like:

• "Failure is another stepping stone to greatness."
• "When we give ourselves permission to fail, we also give ourselves permission to excel."
• "Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly."
• "The greatest glory in living lies not in ever falling, but in rising every time we fall." And, my favorite;
• "I never fail – I either succeed or I learn."

These are all true and, let's face it, I'm a big fan of a good mantra to help me keep my head in the right space.

Then again, there are failures and there are… failures.

Making those little daily mistakes, learning from them, and correcting them is part and parcel of your growth and development in any walk of life. If you're a regular No Bullsh!t Leadership listener, you've probably already got a pretty good handle on this process.

But, there are two situations where this doesn't necessarily hold true:

1. When you keep making the same mistake repeatedly; or,
2. When the failure is so big that it has a deeper effect on your psyche.

Both scenarios can cause you to lose a tremendous amount of confidence, so working out how to come back from these failures is much harder… and much more important!

I start the newsletter by talking about the less publicized reasons why failure is indeed our friend. I'll then go a little deeper to talk about how failure affected me in the past, and my antidote for getting through it. And, finally, I give you a couple of really powerful ideas for how to bounce back from any significant failure that you might experience.

HELPFUL FRAMING FOR FAILURE AND RESILIENCE

We all understand the relationship between failure and learning. It's not always easy, but we're much more likely to take failure in our stride when we approach it from the learning angle. There are a couple of other reasons that I found over the years have made failure my friend. They've really neutralized any fear that I might have, and helped me in my quest to achieve grace under pressure.

I'm going to outline these principles with the intent that I can help you to move beyond just enduring your failures, and show you how to use them strategically to improve your leadership.

Let's face it, no one likes to fail. I don't. No healthy, sane person does. But if you can just find your way to dig a little deeper underneath those superficial mantras, there is some real gold. I'm going to give you two things that really work for me:

1. Failure provides contrast.

The best things in life are exactly that, because of the contrast. It's your ability to experience the vast difference between the highest of highs, and the lowest of lows. If you never know the depths of failure, your ability to enjoy your successes is going to be lessened. If all you experience is success, it's too easy to become blasé about it, and then over time it doesn't quite hold the same appeal.

Let me give you an example. I'm a simple man, so I'm a huge fan of home-baked, warm apple pie. In my world, it has to be served with the highest quality French vanilla ice cream (you can imagine how much I'm in my element at Thanksgiving)!

When I mentioned this to a close friend of mine many years ago, he said something quite profound: “Marty, I'm not a big fan of French vanilla ice cream. Whenever I've had it, the first bite is unbelievably good. The second bite is… just okay. And every bite after that, well, sort of tastes like cardboard."

And he was absolutely right, which is why Thanksgiving is only one day a year. It's the contrast that makes these things worthwhile. If you look at the immediate aftermath of any failure through that lens, it gives you a reason to look forward to the upside of the feeling that will inevitably come with your next major success.

2. If you can manage to frame failure in terms of risk, it opens the door to great leadership.

You're probably familiar with my core principle of excellence over perfection. Perfectionism is rarely driven by a quest for superior achievement – it's more commonly associated with a fear of failure. Overcoming perfectionism requires you to master your fear of failure. Once you do, it liberates you in the decision-making cycle.

You can more readily make the judgment calls that are going to tell you how fast you can move. Your risk-based analysis is going to tell you how much data is enough… how much consultation is enough… how much competitor intelligence is enough… and you'll be able to make better decisions faster.

As you've probably heard me say before, a decision that's 80% right today is infinitely better than a decision that's 85% right next week. Which, in turn, is infinitely better than a decision that's 90% right next month.

And nothing ever gets to a hundred percent. Nothing. Ever.

You can't build momentum unless you're prepared to experience some failure along the way.

WRAPPING MY HEAD AROUND MAJOR FAILURES

I was very fortunate during my corporate career that I didn't experience any really major failures. But that wasn't down to my superior capability and competence – there was a significant measure of luck involved in that, particularly when it came to the safety of my people.

Keeping people safe in industrial businesses can be incredibly difficult. I remember reading one quarterly investor presentation from a global mining company that proudly highlighted the fact that they'd operated for a whole three months without a fatality. Of course, with many operating sites in Africa where the safety standards can be vastly different, it's not hard to see why.

No matter how much you invest in procedures, systems, and processes to try to keep your people safe, it's impossible to police every choice that's made by every individual at every moment during their shift.

We often say that culture is what people choose to do when you're not watching.

This is why behavioral safety is such a critical thing. Unless you create a culture where people are accountable and empowered to make the decisions that keep them safe, there will always be a risk of significant incidents and injuries.

There were two occasions when I was CEO of CS Energy where, if it weren't for a decent measure of luck, one of our people could have been killed.

I remember a particularly candid conversation I had with the board after one such incident. Coincidentally, at that particular point, our lag indicators looked really good, and they had done for a number of months. I'd been telling the board repeatedly not to become complacent, because my observation was that our culture couldn't possibly support that level of safety performance in the longer term.

I was trying to make them more aware of the risk profile that we actually had, which was way greater than our numbers suggested. The chairman gave me a hammering (in the nicest possible way, of course): "Marty, you've been telling us for a year now that this is your number one priority, so why aren't we seeing the shift in culture that you've been promising us?"

He was absolutely right. One of the other non-executive directors, John Pegler was an old mining executive who really knew his way around safety, and even he jumped on the pile and (somewhat empathetically) pursued the same line of questioning.

The conversation probably only lasted for half an hour. In that time, we covered a lot of ground:

• We examined the company's investment in safety systems;
• We debated the glacial speed of the cultural change in the operations; and
• We were challenged on the lack of impact that my new management team was having on the workforce.

This conversation was so critical to me, because I managed to draw a conclusion that became the future bedrock of my ability to deal with major failures. (Just as an aside: it's a good thing I was so comfortable handling conflict, otherwise the conversation would've been shut down much sooner and none of the value I got from it would've surfaced).

Failure is going to happen. I recognized and verbalized my own frustration to the board, and then I expressed a really important principle that changed the way I was able to deal with failure. Here's where I landed.

1. I absolutely believed, wholeheartedly, in my intent, my tenacity, and my commitment to making a difference to this company.
2. I knew that no one else could possibly be more committed than I was to making positive change.
3. I also knew that I was prepared to do whatever it took without fear or favor to turn the company around in every respect.
4. And I knew that I was probably one of the very small number of CEOs who could genuinely make a difference to that safety culture.

I realize this might sound a little arrogant, but I'd been around for a while by this stage and I'd seen how other leaders did things in asset-intensive businesses. Most of them just put culture change in the ‘too hard basket’ and they'd go about incrementally capturing the low hanging fruit of cost-cutting and outsourcing.

Make no mistake, failure is baked in. If you hang around long enough in corporate life, you're going to be part of a failure that's much larger than just a missed deadline.

It's the fundamental belief that you have in your own intent, your tenacity, and your ability to make a difference that's going to help you to move forward confidently no matter how big that failure is.

WHEN IT IS A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

As I said, bouncing back from big failures takes something more, and self-awareness is key. If you're making mistakes over and over and things don't seem to be improving, it could be time to take a step back. They may only be little things, but they add up over time. Small, repeated failures are cumulative.

Your confidence will take a hammering, and then you're even less likely to turn things around. Seek counsel and make sure you're trying to get to the bottom of whatever's going on:

• You may have a problem with the process you're using for decision-making;
• You may have an issue with capability in your team;
• You may simply be trying to do too much, and diffusing your mental capacity across too many low value priorities.

Whatever you do, treat it seriously and get on top of it.

So how do you deal with the really big failures? I'm dedicating this episode to a close friend of mine, David Hubbard, whose father passed away in hospital unexpectedly just recently. We caught up in the day or two following his father's death, and I related to David an article that I’d come across in Entrepreneur magazine (This Emergency Room Doctor Has Seen it All ) that examined how emergency room teams handle failure.

During my career, I didn't have to deal with death (fortunately), so to keep my teams grounded and to help them retain their sense of perspective, I'd occasionally say something like this: "Hey, listen guys, just relax. We're not landing space shuttles here. We're not doing cardiothoracic surgery. No one's dying on the table."

But in the emergency room, people do die on the table, every week. How do emergency room doctors and nurses deal with it? Of course, many just bottle it up and move on to the next patient, eventually becoming desensitized to what they experience every day. It's the only way they can continue to do what they do.

But one doctor spoke about a technique he used when someone his team was trying to save passed away before they could be stabilized. He would conduct a little ritual where he and the team would gently place a hand on the deceased patient and take a moment to acknowledge what had happened by saying these words:

"Thank you for teaching me. I'm sorry that all I could do for you today was to learn."

Imagine the power of this in your own life: leaning into failure willingly and taking accountability; paying respect to the person who was impacted by your lack of capacity, resources, or skill; recognizing that, "Hey, maybe no one could have saved this patient, given the condition they were in" but irrespective of that, making a promise to take some good from the situation by using the experience consciously to be better for the next patient.

I found this to be incredibly powerful and I'll no doubt use it in the future to bounce back from any of my major failures.

The opportunity and the will to make peace with a failure in that moment makes it more likely that you'll be able to serve your people to your utmost ability.

For all of the time and energy we spend talking about resilience, it's not until you're in the thick of a major failure that you really learn these lessons. I genuinely hope that you can embrace the few techniques I've covered here, so that when you find yourself facing that mountainous climb out of the failure hole, you can take the first recovery steps with confidence and resolve.

Your people need you to be the kind of leader who can do that!

The above article is from Episode 301 of the No Bullsh!t Leadership podcast. Each week, I share the secrets of high performance leadership; the career accelerators that you can’t learn in business school, and your boss is unlikely to share with you. Listen now on Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or on your favorite podcast player.