Like many people, I've always been captivated by the topic of leadership. Aside from living it for two decades during my service in the U.S. Army, I continued to study it through my graduate and doctorate programs because of how impactful leadership is in people’s personal and professional lives. I both lived and studied it because I’ve always believed that when one combines experience with knowledge, it produces wisdom.
Wisdom, like leadership, is fraught with subjectivity and allows for vastly differentiated opinions on the subject. Consequently, there is no shortage of lessons learned extrapolated from the aftermath of leadership failures, but having walked in those shoes for so many years, I would have been grateful to have known how to lead through failure — not just avoid it.
Many formal leadership development topics focus on avoiding failure, but few prepare leaders on how to successfully lead their way through it. And yet, no leader I’ve ever met can boast to have a 100% success rate, so the fact is all leaders will experience some form of failure over their tenure — and some more so than others.
In an effort to hope for the best, but plan for the worst, here are three ways to lead your team, and yourself, through failure:
1. Lead With Positivity
Few things are as impactful to followers as a leader who applies authentic optimism when leading through failure. Attitudes are contagious, so whenever adversity rears its ugly head, leaders have to set the example by embracing the reality of the situation and pushing others through the hardship with a positive attitude. In the military, we referred to this as “embracing the suck.”
The key here is to acknowledge the failure, put it into perspective, offer an enthusiastic vision that motivates the team to see a pathway to success and get the team moving forward again to prevent them from getting bogged down in failure. Doing so will galvanize team trust, confidence and credibility. The bottom line is no matter how bad the failure feels at the time, it could always have been worse.
2. Lead With Ownership
This is a tough lesson for any leader to learn: Leaders can delegate authority, but not responsibility. Whenever a team succeeds, the team members get the credit. When it fails, the leader must own it. There are several reasons why it’s crucial for the leader to take ownership, but while leading through failure, it serves a specific purpose: to remove toxic performance barriers by shifting the blame from the team (or individual team member) to the leader. This concentrates the team’s time and energy on developing solutions, rather than wasting it on playing the blame game.
The key here is to prevent the team from self-destructing and making matters worse. There will be no shortage of powerful emotions — anger, frustration, disappointment, etc. Such potent feelings will quickly break the team down if the leader doesn’t keep them focused on solving the problem rather than justifying the cause. Additionally, having the team know that their leader is there to support them when they fail is invaluable for building respect, faithfulness and followership.
3. Lead With Learning
Despite social perception and popular belief, failure is common and part of everyday life. The important thing is to leverage these teachable moments by learning from each mistake and preventing it from happening again in the future. As the old saying goes, one cannot solve the problem by applying the same thinking that created it, so identify how the failure occurred, analyze ways to undo or salvage the mistake, choose the best path forward and communicate the way ahead. In many cases, failures can be mined for opportunities, but the highest priority is atoning for the failure by eliminating or mitigating any damage caused by it.
The key here is to adopt a learning attitude around failure that will help inform future decisions. Some failures are more impactful than others, but taking calculated risks is a tenet of great leadership that often leads to big wins. When it doesn’t, mentor the team on how to not only learn from it, but bounce back from it as well. Lastly, don’t be afraid to share the lessons learned with others in the organization. Doing so will instill resilience and creative thinking, and shape both current and future leaders in the process.
In summary, leading through failure can be scary — but it doesn’t have to be. If you find yourself in such a situation, remember: Lead with a positive attitude by embracing the failure and offering an optimistic pathway to success. Lead with ownership by accepting responsibility for the failure and empowering the team to focus on creating solutions. And lead with learning by understanding what went wrong and what can be learned from it in both the present and the future.
