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Dealing with vs. Celebrating failure

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There’s a meme that has been making the rounds through leadership circles for some time around celebrating failure. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t pushing the boundaries. The original premise of this line of thinking is that failure is not something to be feared. But there is a difference between using failure to learn well-earned lessons and declaring success after blowing up on the launchpad.

The failure cliches

It’s worth starting with some of the most common cliches around failure:

  • I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. — Thomas Edison
  • Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts. — Winston Churchill
  • There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure. — Paulo Coelho
  • Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. — Robert F Kennedy

Doing a simple web search for failure quotes yields hundreds more. The basic gist of the resulting tome of sayings? Anything worth doing is difficult, and achieving anything great is unlikely to happen on the first try.

The side note no one mentions

It is absolutely true that forging a new path is difficult. And when you are the first, there is no established play that you can follow. If the endeavor is challenging enough, the odds that you get it right on the first attempt can be exceedingly low. Indeed, failure might be inevitable.

But the people who provide these quotes that make us feel better almost always do so from a position of having succeeded in very objective and often measurable ways. They aren’t making the point that failing is the new succeeding. They are making the point that failure does not necessarily constitute an endpoint. Put simply, they aren’t advocating failure so much as they are championing the notion that you ought to stand up after you fall.

Distorting the message

Somewhere along the way, their message has gotten distorted. Maybe it’s the cleverness of internet memes. Maybe it’s the character limit on tweets. Whatever the cause, the message frequently gets distilled into something far more insidious: we should celebrate failure.

No. No no no no no. And again no.

There is a significant difference between being resilient when failure happens and celebrating it as if it is the intended outcome. What makes some of these leaders great is not that they embrace failure but that they continue on the path undeterred by falling short. It’s not the obstacle but the achievement that allows them to speak with authority. More bluntly, it’s their success not their failure that makes them experts on the topic.

And this matters why?

When we reduce failure to a pithy saying or transform it into a reason to celebrate, we run the risk of losing our fear. In the high tech space especially, we are constantly pushing the envelope in terms of what can be done, and we are operating under the pressure of a window to market that is perpetually closing. To execute in this environment, we need to have a healthy sense of both urgency and paranoia.

The challenge for leaders is to allow people to fail without losing hope. But the key to threading that needle is not making failure something to celebrate. Rather it’s removing the judgment that comes with failure. People don’t fear failing so much as they fear being judged for those failures. If you can foster a culture that is hard on the issues but soft on the people, you can demand excellence while still allowing people to operate without angst.

By not correctly diagnosing the actual pain point—fear of being judged—we overcompensate and end up celebrating the very thing we are working to overcome. Over time, this evolves from being resilient in the face of failure to not having a healthy fear of failure. The path to mediocrity for any company is accepting failure as an ok end state.

The bottom line

The culture we ought to be striving for is one where failure is neither ok nor catastrophic. People need to understand that while failure might be inevitable in our pursuit of something truly new and great, it doesn’t mean that it is ok. When we fail, we ought to feel bad. The trick is not letting those bad feelings fester and turn into discouragement that prevents us from getting up.

But failure as an acceptable end state also robs us of our edge to be great. When falling short is ok, we lose the do-or-die attitude that’s necessary to make gigantic leaps forward. Necessity is the mother of all invention. Put simply, when you have to do something to survive, you do it. When we accept failure, we remove the necessity part, and without that, what will drive invention?

[Today’s fun fact: A one-minute kiss burns about 26 calories. I have so many questions about this one, and a couple of fitness-related business ideas.]

The post Dealing with vs. Celebrating failure appeared first on Plexxi.


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