Why it matters: Building your team’s resilience is how leaders are able to fail with purpose, not by accident.
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My face was on a balloon.
It was uncomfortable.
But it was also hilarious.
At my first book reading for Being Human-Centric, a friend of mine came in proudly toting a celebratory balloon with my face plastered on the side. Having printed out a giant picture of my face, it was then taped to the side of a helium-filled mylar balloon.
Even in writing this, I still think that balloon should have been able to hold its weight. But alas, it could not be upright unless someone held it by the neck.
Merely the weight of paper caused the whole demeanor of the ballon to change.
Laughing, we took pictures and enjoyed the sentiment that this small gesture represented. As the small group that had gathered continued to laugh good naturedly at the sad-looking droop, my friend responded simply “Well, mission failed successfully.”
Mission failed successfully.
As leaders, do we ever think about how our missions, our goals, our ideas can fail successfully?
I talk about this in my book, how failure is only terrible when it’s wasted. There is such a thing as intelligent failure, and the defining significance between the two is not in the outcome, but in how you got to the defeat.
Wasted, in my elaborated opinion from the great Carol Dweck who originally coined this term, might include:
Failure due to lack of clarity (could be avoided)
Failure due to lack of planning (could be avoided)
Failure due to lack of transparency (could be avoided)
Failure due to lack of listening (could be avoided)
Failure due to lack of curiosity (could be avoided)
I could probably keep going.
Now, I doubt anyone reading is thinking “no, Rachel, I disagree- all of these are signs of excellent leadership.” But I don’t think we stop to consider how simply these can occur. How easily they happen.
As a manager or leader there are so many things you have to juggle, from accounting your activities to senior leadership, to addressing productivity hurdles, to ensuring goal delivery, to resolving inter-personal conflict. There’s never not something to be done.
So let me rephrase these wasted failure moments into what it might look like practically, as we race to put out fires and keep all of our proverbial plates spinning:
Rushing a conversation with a report, thinking that they have envisioned what we want or need without fully articulating what “done” looks like
Urgently pushing deliverables forward at the request of people outside of your team, not knowing scope, resources, priorities, or impact
Giving information only to those that you delegate to, instead of everyone that needs to assist the new task owner, diluting opportunities for alignment and understanding
Responding to an “important” email while in-front of you, your report describes why exactly a requested project won’t be wise or viable, which you then downgrade as not impactful enough because the nuance of production is not fully digested by your distracted brain
Directing new activities or processes to solve critical problems, hoping that this quick decision will save so much time and frustration for your team, while not inspecting and inquiring about solutions that have already been tried, and stopped, to ensure that you fully understand the complexities of the situation or lessons learned from previous attempts.
These all seem entirely reasonable, and in fact, I’ve done many of them myself. Great leaders make hundreds of decisions every day- there are goals to be set, projects to run, people to support.
It’s so, so easy to going too fast and falling prey to wasteful failure.
However, there are guardrails that you can put into place with our teams to ensure that our failures are always intelligent.
One can be having team values that allow employees to identify those proverbial pot holes the car is headed toward, and instead of giving up on flagging them for you, they have the confidence to address them again in a way that makes you slow and see. Developing psychological safety is another, creating habits of trust with your team which allow you to increase production, knowing that your reports are equally partnered in owning the success and quality of work being done.
Things like these can be incredible tools for any leader, as they look to shape organizational goals, ideas, and future wins.
If these tools are available to employees, then even an inability to achieve the objective doesn’t become failure in our classical sense.
Instead, you can consider it to be a mission failed, but successfully. And next time, you can be one step closer to the outcome that everyone is able to claim as pure success.
Dig a little deeper: Explore more about the book at my website, thehumancentricleader.com/book.
What’s next: Join my February challenge, where you can hear about my journey into the novelty of comfort, and my first novelty failure.
Talk soon,
Rachel
Leadership trainer, novelty junkie, and human being
P.s. Do you want to hear more about what exactly this novelty experiment is? Check out this post and read more in-depth about the Novelty Experiment.
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