By Marilyn Orr and Kelley Russell-DuVarney Vision Coaching
As executive coaches, we’ve worked with leaders who fear failure and others who embrace it. Fear of failure can sound like, "we have a process and we stick to it" whereas embracing failure often sounds like, "how can we positively disrupt our efforts?"
In today’s complex business world, failure isn’t something to be avoided but leveraged. In fact, embracing failure is critical to success – and essential to innovation and advancement.
Sound counterintuitive? It might. But we’re here to tell you that failure, when approached with the right mindset, is a powerful tool for progress.
In a three-part series, we’ll explore how leaders' approach towards failure can play a critical role in organizational success.
Too often, organizations bury their failure in silence, create cultures where missteps are feared and penalized, stifling learning and innovation.
We’ll dive into the art of smart risk-taking and consider ways to cultivate a culture that embraces or even celebrates failure. Most importantly, we'll explore how reframing your individual and organizational approach towards failure can improve the learning cycle and lead to greater innovation.
Let’s start today with the landscape: In a fast-moving, volatile landscape, failure isn’t just inevitable – it’s necessary.
Yet, too often, organizations bury their failure in silence, create cultures where missteps are feared and penalized, stifling learning and innovation.
This approach is especially harmful when the ability to adapt and innovate is essential for long-term success.
However, not all failures are created equal.
Some, like basic failures, happen in predictable environments and are largely preventable. We are certainly not encouraging more of this type of failure. That said, how leaders choose to respond or react to these basic failures impacts both culture and innovation.
Perhaps the most valuable failures are intelligent failures – those calculated risks that allow leaders and organizations to push known boundaries that result in novel solutions.
Kelley remembers a client who was a vice-president in an organization that failed to meet a very public delivery date. The date was missed due to an imbalance in resourcing between departments; however the VPs of both departments quickly reduced the failure to poor cooperation between two employees.
A failure to cooperate in and of itself would meet the criteria of a basic organizational failure. However, during the coaching session, an imbalance in resourcing was identified and alerted the VP to a basic failure within the current planning process.
In contrast, complex failures arise in uncertain contexts and can be harder to foresee. Pause to consider how a confluence of ordinary factors can jeopardize rocket launches and train operations alike. Communication, planning, and modelling are all part of daily business and yet when more than one of these processes break down, a complex failure can result.
Perhaps the most valuable failures are intelligent failures – those calculated risks that allow leaders and organizations to push known boundaries that result in novel solutions.
To harness the benefits of this failure-safe approach to business, many leaders need to update their mental model for failure. In our work with leaders, we've noticed how early beliefs about failure can be traced back to our earliest role models, family members and teachers.
A client once said that her parents repeatedly emphasized that erasers were meant for other children. In other words, failure isn't expected or tolerated in our family. Maybe you, too, were told this.
One of the benefits of having a leadership coach is to be able to design your intelligent failures with a strategic thought partner.
Leaders who choose to orient themselves to a world that is VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous – and fully embrace a growth mindset often treat failure as an important and integral part of learning. In failure-safe environments, failure is reframed as feedback and learning, and the avoidance of intelligent failures as missed opportunity.
One of the benefits of having a leadership coach is to be able to design your intelligent failures with a strategic thought partner. The support of a coach can help leaders create a failure-safe environment and provides them with a protected space for feedback and capturing the learning.
As leaders, you can gain a decisive advantage by coaching your team and yourself through failures rather than penalizing or avoiding failures, allowing you to place a focus where it is most beneficial, on learning and innovation. Consistent reflection and debriefs also help to normalize failure, creating feedback-rich environments flourishing with innovation.
This article is the first in our three-part series inspired by insights shared by Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School’, s insights from at the 2024 Institute of Coaching Conference. Stay with us as we explore mastering the art of smart risk-taking in leadership – how failure can propel your organization toward greatness.
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