How to Shift from Failure to Success
If you’re a leader, here's an undeniable truth.
You will mess up. All leaders fail at some point in their role. Even good leaders.
Little mistakes
Some of these may be smaller mistakes, like sending out an agenda to a meeting weeks in advance only to arrive at the meeting and expect someone else to lead. When all eyes turn to you, you’re like, “What agenda?”
Then, your colleague forwards the email back to you that you had sent out weeks ago. Which only proves that you must have been sleep-typing because you have no recollection at all of ever working on that agenda.
Not that I have ever done anything like that. Purely theoretical, you understand.
Major Mistakes
Or maybe you make a massive mistake that costs your organization a fortune.
Like leading a team that collects boatloads of dollars in cash sales, and because you forget to pay attention to security someone steals all of it from right under your nose.
But of course, I would never be that kind of leader to let that happen. No way.
Reactions to Failure
When we make leadership mistakes, we react in different ways.
(Denial is a popular one, as you may have noticed.)
One common response is the Failure Free Fall. It's when your failure sends you plunging down into self-doubt and self-criticism.
You feel like a failure and deal with deep regret. You start second-guessing yourself and rehashing all the things you should've done differently. You endlessly beat yourself up for not being better and lose confidence.
It's normal to feel this way when you focus on the negative aspects of your failure. But no one benefits from a long-time pity party. It's time to switch lenses and turn that failure into a learning opportunity.
Whip out the trampoline and use those free falls to bounce back stronger!
Antidote to the Failure Free Fall
Instead of viewing your failures as final, there’s another way to view them. As a leader I know once said, "We don’t have failures here, only experiments that didn't work."
Of course, failure is real. But the key is to learn and grow from those failures. It's all about shifting your mindset and seeing your efforts as experiments that provide valuable lessons.
Embracing this mindset allows you to leverage and leap forward from the fall. Experiments set expectations that things might go wrong and that there will be learnings on how to improve.
The more failures you learn from, the better things get, and the closer your organization gets to achieving impact and results.
The Experimental Mindset
Approaching leadership as a series of experiments has changed how I operate.
🧪 Every new initiative is Experiment 1.0, knowing that there's always room for improvement. If things don't go perfectly, I don't beat myself up because I know there's always Experiment 2.0 waiting to be better.
📝 Instead of obsessing over creating perfect documents, I now create drafts that are open to input and feedback. It promotes collaboration and empowers others to have a voice in the process.
🤗 I used to berate myself for even the tiniest mistake. Now, I embrace my mistakes because I understand they are opportunities to learn and grow.
The experimental mindset elevates your leadership and your organization. It refines processes, enhances teams, and clarifies the mission. It cultivates an environment that values learning, experimentation, and innovation.
Embracing a learning mindset means less fear and more growth. You know that even if you mess up, it's just an experiment that didn't work!
How about you? What is a way that you think about failure that has really helped you?
TRYING TO AVOID FAILURE IN ACHIEVING YOUR ORGANIZATIONAL GOALS?
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