By Jason Wingard
Source: Forbes
Photo Source: Unsplash,
Tiger Woods surprised everyone, even bookies, when he recently conquered the coveted Masters Tournament. It was his first major win since 2008 – the year before personal and physical issues began to plague his illustrious and historic career. "To have the opportunity to come back like this,” he told ESPN, “it is probably one of the biggest wins I've had.'' Woods was not the only one who recognized the unlikely nature of his return to prominence. Even former President Barack Obama tweeted: “To come back and win the Masters after all the highs and lows is a testament to excellence, grit, and determination.” While most business leaders will hopefully never face a downfall as public or as grand as Woods, learning to accept — and overcome — failure is a vital component of success. Only half of small businesses survive beyond five years, and only 20% to 30% of startups deliver their projected return on investment. Even in businesses that succeed, leaders will undoubtedly grapple with countless smaller defeats. Here are three steps for recovering with grace. Own Your Mistakes First and foremost, leaders should accept responsibility for their actions. They should clearly explain their errors to team members and stakeholders — and do so “without euphemism and without judgment,” according to Helio Fred Garcia, president of a crisis management firm. This approach empowers team members to admit their own mistakes in the future, he said, as well as engender a “culture of trust and camaraderie.”
Dominic Barton, global managing director of McKinsey & Company, expanded upon this idea in the New York Times. “The best leaders are those who accept failure, whether it is theirs or the failure of their subordinates,” he said. “When leaders defer responsibility they create anger and resentment in their organization, but when they claim responsibility for failure and own it, they often gain greater loyalty from their followers.”
Early in his tenure as the CEO of tech company Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst decided to take a product to market before it was ready. It was a costly mistake. Whitehurst recovered by quickly admitting fault and explaining the logic behind his erroneous decision. In the Harvard Business Review, he wrote that his team thanked him for his candor, and even grew to trust him more. “I’ve learned that nothing builds engagement more than being accountable to the people in your organization,” he wrote. “You simply have to have the confidence to own your mistakes and admit when you’re wrong.”
Focus on the Lessons Though leaders should readily admit their failures, they should not dwell on them. Since research has shown that the moods of leaders are contagious, they should strive to avoid unnecessary negativity, which can permeate an entire corporate culture, and instead position mistakes as a learning opportunity.
Following the demise of his first startup, Ethan Senturia wrote a book called Unwound: Real-Time Reflections from a Stumbling Entrepreneur. He told the Knowledge@Wharton podcast that reflecting on his failure was a “really important exercise for him,” and gave the following advice to other leaders: “Don’t be afraid to fail. Don’t be afraid to try again. And don’t be afraid to look at it and study it and own it.”
Adopt a ‘Growth Mindset’ After leaders uncover their failure’s teachings, they should wield them as tools that propel them forward. "Some organizations spend too long focusing on the failure,” John Danner, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California Berkeley and co-author of The Other F-Word, told Inc. “Once you've spent a little time reflecting and absorbed any wisdom you can from the experience, it's time to move on… How are you going to use those lessons you've just learned?"
An integral part of this forward progress, according to social psychologist and executive coach Erin Baker, is to adopt a “growth mindset.” This allows leaders to see failure not as a roadblock, but as an essential component of the growth process. Or, as Ashley Good, founder of Fail Forward, wrote on the World Economic Forum blog: “Instead of focusing on the loss we have to frame each failure as an opportunity to accelerate our learning and become better and stronger in the long run.”
Sara Blakely, the founder of shapewear company Spanx, is one leader who has lived her whole life with a growth mindset. When she was growing up, her father asked every evening at the dinner table: “What did you fail at today?” As she explained to Anderson Cooper: “What he did was he redefined failure… instead of failure being the outcome, failure became not trying.” Blakely, who has often attributed her success to her failures, remains America’s youngest self-made female billionaire.
As she and other leaders have shown, failure may be an inevitable part of leadership, but it does not have to be negative. Some of the most successful companies, in fact, have embraced failure as part of their business strategy. In a Ted talk about celebrating failure, Astro Teller, “captain of moonshots” for X, Google’s famous laboratory for big ideas, said: “We spend most of our time breaking things and trying to prove that we're wrong… We work hard at X to make it safe to fail.”
From Thomas Edison’s lightbulbs to Google’s moonshots, failure has become an accepted — and necessary — part of innovation. By utilizing time-tested strategies, leaders can not only overcome failure; they can grow from it. As Henry Ford wrote: “One who fears the future, who fears failure, limits his activities. Failure is only the opportunity… to begin again.”
Congratulations, Tiger Woods. Happy Black History Month!
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