10 Ways to Fail Your Way to Success

I hate failing. Failure feels like wasted life. Yes, I know I’m supposed to embrace failure and learn. But, given the choice, I’d succeed more!

I haven’t failed for lack of good intentions. Frankly, I’m troubled that the path down is faster than the path up.

Fear of failure:

Afraid to fail is afraid to try; afraid to try guarantees failure.

The fear of failure prevents success.

Stunning success stands atop many stunning failures. Edison said, “I’ve failed my way to success.”

10 Ways to Fail Well:

1. Pursue next time more than last time.
2. Reject finger pointing. Blame gets you off the hook but never produces success.
3. Respond with optimism, not anger. Confidence answers anger; inadequacy fuels it.
4. “Forgive and remember,” Bob Sutton in, Good Boss Bad Boss.
5. Share lessons learned from failure. Leadership’s greatest influence occurs through failures. Frailty enhances your influence as long as it’s not an excuse.
6. Seek clarity. Resist urges to close your eyes. Open them instead.
7. Call “failure meetings” and ask, “What isn’t working?” Make talking about failure normal not taboo.
8. Celebrate adaptation, if you can’t celebrate failure directly. “We changed.”
9. Fail small in order to succeed large. Try, test, improve, and move forward. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
10. Dig into ways that failure makes you better. “Failure changes for the better, success for the worse.” Seneca

One cause:

Often I fail because I don’t listen. I know too much. I’ve learned confidence becomes over-confidence when it closes my ears. True confidence listens.

What’s at the root of many of your failures?

How can you or organizations fail well?

Five Ways to Overcome the Folly of Perseverance

Bad ideas were good once but nothing always works.

Quitters never win. At least that’s what we think.

The danger of perseverance is
it’s virtuous but not always wise.

Thomas Edison famously said, “Many of life’s failures are men who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Don’t let Edison’s statement drive you along a losing course.

Why we persevere when we should quit:

1. Self-confidence. Leaders persist when they should adapt because of perceived competence. “I can make it work.”
2. Progress. A little progress is a dangerous thing.
3. Hope. “Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man.” Friedrich Nietzsche.
4. Success in the past.
5. Fear of failure.

Bonus: The value of past effort drives people to commit more effort in the present, sunk cost.

How to quit:

1. Adapting isn’t giving up. Stay focused on big goals while adjusting methods.
2. Define failure, as well as success, before beginning.
3. Ask, “What would new leaders do?” Then, do it.
4. Invite feedback from outsiders. You don’t see what others see.
5. Believe self-confidence may lead you astray.

Bonus: Never let the fear of failure and losing face make you foolish. Humble yourself.

Why do leaders hang on too long?

How can leaders learn to let go of things that aren’t working?

The 5 Positive Powers of Self-Doubt

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If you grapple with self-doubt, keep reading. If you don’t grapple with it, you’re dangerous.

Experts sing, “Believe in yourself,” However, unquestioned self-belief produces self-serving leaders who won’t adapt.

Tom Petty captures the experience of many in, “Saving Grace,” when he sings, “You’re confident but not really sure.”

Confident but not sure is better than blind belief.

Self-doubt has its benefits. Robert Sutton in, Good Boss Bad Boss, says, “The best bosses dance on the edge of overconfidence, but a healthy dose of self-doubt and humility saves them from turning arrogant and pigheaded. Bosses who fail to strike this balance are incompetent, dangerous to follow, and downright demeaning.”

Move forward in spite of doubt.
Worry if you’re not worried.

Believe in yourself enough to bring self-doubt with you into decisions and commitments. “The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it’s not without doubt but in spite of doubt,” Rollo May.

Fear of making mistakes is healthy when it raises intensity, motivates preparation, and inspires vigilance. It’s unhealthy when it paralyzes you.

Press into doubt with deadlines.
An effective deadline is a mini-crisis.

Give yourself reasonable time to explore options and then pull the trigger. “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand,” Raymond Chandler.

Focus more on the process – what’s next – and less on final outcomes.

The 5 positive powers of healthy self-doubt:

1. Motivates preparation. Useful self-doubt doesn’t paralyze it motivates.
2. Humbles the heart.
3. Opens the mind.
4. Invites others in.
5. Builds confidence in others. You’re trustworthy if challenges give you pause.

Why are those who sing the song of self-belief so popular? Because everyone has self-doubt. Don’t lose it, use it.

How can leaders use self-doubt as a tool rather than an obstacle to their leadership?

When has self-doubt gone too far?

The Top 5 Mistakes of Unsuccessful Leaders

Mistakes that don’t hurt don’t matter. The worst mistakes are the ones that hurt others. The trouble with leadership is your mistakes always hurt others.

The top 5 mistakes of unsuccessful leaders:

1. Not being open to criticism.
2. Trying to hide mistakes.
3. Not making decisions.
4. Failing to explain objectives.
5. Telling people how to do things rather than telling them what needs to be done and letting them figure out how to do it.

Read more from Facebook contributors.

Good and bad:

Someone said,

“If you don’t make mistakes
you don’t make anything.”

In other words, the fear of making mistakes hinders, delays, even stops forward movement.

The best mistakes are learning
experience that aren’t repeated.

The top 5 positive behaviors of great mistake-makers:

1. Exploration. Good mistake-makers innovate; poor ones repeat and stagnate.
2. Learning and adapting quickly.
3. Enjoyment. Those who can’t learn and adapt can’t enjoy life.
4. Clear perception. Willingness to make mistakes frees leaders from pretending everything’s ok. They see things as they are not as they wish them to be.
5. Increasing efficiency and effectiveness as time passes.

Bonus: Humility; the behavior that makes all others effective.

The top mistake of team-leaders:

Weinzimmer and McConoughey say, “…drama mismanagement derails a leader’s ability to manage teams.” (The Wisdom of Failure)

According to Weinzimmer and McConoughey leaders contribute to overly dramatic atmospheres when they create dysfunctional harmony by:

1. Bullying with intimidating tactics or demeaning comments.
2. Trying to be liked by everyone.
3. Insisting everyone likes each other all the time. The need to preserve the appearance of harmony leads to passive-aggressive behaviors within teams.
4. Mismanaging competition within teams that leads to divisiveness.

Even more on mistakes:

The Top 25 Dumb Mistakes Leaders Make

Top Three Mistakes Leaders Make

13 New-Leader Screw Ups

What lessons have you learned from your mistakes?

Specifically, how do leaders inflate drama in the workplace. How can they deflate it?

Finding Your Future Failure

Fear holds you back like a snare. Once you’re caught, pulling away only tightens the grip. Preparation prevents reaction. Prepare for future failures so you won’t end up caught in the snare of fear.

“One way to combat our fears is to hit them head-on.”
Soren Kaplan in Leapfrogging

Kaplan offers a “finding your future failures” strategy in his book, Leapfrogging.

Kaplan on exploring your biggest possible failure:

1. What does your most disastrous scenario look like?
2. What impact would this worst-case scenario have on individuals, teams, the organization, customers, …
3. What would be the short-term impact on you personally? Long-term impact?
4. What would you personally feel or experience?
5. How could you rebound from this failure?
6. What would you do next?
7. In what way could the failure be used as a stepping-stone?

Step back after exploring:

1. What insights have you gained?
2. What new alternatives or options opened up?
3. Did any of your assumptions or feelings about failure change?

Controlling:

Focus on what you control;
identify, understand and prepare for what you can’t.

Kaplan suggests the source of most of our fear is a feeling of lack of control. Divide a sheet of paper down the middle. Create a bulleted list of items you control and things you cannot control. Explore, evaluate, prioritize, and consider the impact of each item.

I love focusing on positive vision rather than possible failures. But, exploring possible failures before they occur helps free me from the snare of fearing failure.

Thanks:

Thanks to Soren Kaplan for an enlightening conversation. His book, “Leapfrogging: Harnessing the Power of Surprise for Business Breakthroughs,” is a great read. This post is an adaptation of pages 150-153.

How can leaders overcome the fear of failure?

 

Successful Failure

Leaders who can’t fail won’t succeed because failure is essential to success. A world without failure is dead. Furthermore:

Leaders frequently fail at letting others fail.

Leaders who can’t let others fail:

1. Limit growth.
2. Hog tie innovation.
3. Sap confidence.
4. Live fearing the next failure; they’re control freaks.
5. Tend to blame rather than develop.

Hand-holding isn’t helping:

Help strengthens; hand-holding creates dependency. Pseudo-kindness motivated you to hold someone’s hand – protect or cover for them.

Hand-holding doesn’t strengthen it weakens.

For example, you’ve been constantly reminding someone of deadlines because they don’t follow-through. At first it was helpful. But, hand-holding enabled their weakness. Their weakness became your responsibility.

Carrying others isn’t good for anyone, over the long-term.

Frustration from covering incompetency motivates you to let go. Anger gives you the courage to do what you should have done long ago. Not healthy!

Fixing your failure:

Always work with your boss. Say:

1. I’ve been covering for someone’s weaknesses.
2. I thought it would help but it didn’t.
3. I see how I weakened the team.
4. I plan to let go. I hope they rise up but they may fail.
5. Do you have any suggestions?

At this point, the foolishness of hand-holding should be obvious. You blew it.

Five benefits of failure:

Trust: People who “never” fail can’t be trusted.  Trust people who fail and own it. Environments where failure is prohibited are filled with deception, posturing, and blame.

Growth: Failure points are often growth points.

People who can’t fail can’t grow.

Strength: Working through failure strengthens everyone.

Capacity: Strength from failure expands capacity.

Wisdom: Successful failure makes us wise, even if it’s just learning what doesn’t work.

The only reason to let someone fail is long-term benefit outweighs short-term risk.  Fail small.

 How do you know when it’s time to let someone fail?

How can leaders help others fail well?

See how Facebook readers answered: “Before you let someone fail _______.”

Sweet 16 Potent Leadership Quotes – You Decide

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It’s easy to confuse and difficult to clarify. Confusion drives us toward clarity. Clarity allows us to act.

I’m looking for your perspective and insights on this set of Leadership Freak quotes. Will you grab one or more and expand, correct, clarify, and/or modify it.

The Sweet 16:

1. Don’t let the stupid things others do be the reason you do stupid things.
2. When we believe that we matter and what we do matters, we lead from within.
3. Dream, imagine, think, and plan all you want. Nothing happens until you take the first step.
4. Fearing failure is a sure way to fail.
5. If you plan to grow a business, plan to grow people.
6. Don’t narrow the dream, expand the team. From: “Dream Builders”
7. It’s amazing how a good word motivates better than a criticism. See the bad, say the good.
8. The advantage of a poor memory is I’m constantly coming up with new ideas!
9. Hey give yourself permission to make a difference. If not you, who?
10. If you hide your failures, you’ll fail. From: “Open Leadership – The Failure Imperative”
11. If you can reach your vision with your current resources, you need a bigger vision!
12. You don’t see you like others see you. From: “Spotting Blind Spots”
13. Enjoying approval is healthy. Needing it is sick.
14. What’s worse than failure? Succeeding at what doesn’t matter.
15. The more leaders focus on “what” the more effective they are.
16. People that can’t decide what they like end up liking nothing.

Expand:

“Don’t let the stupid things others do be the reason you do stupid things.”

Self-sabotage includes short-sighted behaviors excused by our frustration with irritants like failed systems and incompetent people. Unmanaged frustration seldom succeeds.

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What do these leadership quotes make you think? (Expand, correct, clarify, modify)

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From Defeated Pessimist to Realistic Optimist

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Pessimists can’t lead.

Pessimism serves leaders. Solving problems requires you first see and acknowledge them. If you plan to move forward, stop dancing around the elephant and dance with it. Ask hard questions.

Additionally, successful leadership includes looking down the road anticipating and preparing for failures, challenges, and problems. If it can go wrong, eventually it will. Get ready.

But:

Pessimists can’t lead when they focus on what can’t be done.

From defeated pessimist to realistic optimist:

1. See it and know it’s a dead end. The ability to shoot things down may be helpful, but it’s not a virtue.
2. Trust others. Listen to the insights of others when they’re speaking from experience or through the lens of their strengths. Go with them rather than your pessimism.
3. Don’t solve every problem, just the important ones. Reject the rest. Pessimists get overwhelmed because they can’t prioritize.
4. Do something now and adapt as you go. The deadliest danger of pessimism is too much talking and not enough doing. Action creates a new kind of talking for pessimists. Talking without action centers on problems. Talking during action focuses on solutions. “How can we fix this” is better than “here’s why it can’t be done.”
5. Ask what’s next.
6. Frustration from feeling powerless is a myth. You can always do something. (See: Gifts From an Empty Cup”)
7. Acknowledge fear motivates pessimism – fear of failure, fear of losing reputation. Fear may be helpful but sometimes it’s the coward’s way out.
8. Realize you drag others down, too. Your negativity makes others negative. Welcome to the dark work environment that you create.
9. Plan for the worst. Contingency plans are a pessimist’s gift. You’re going places when you get through “what if” to find “we could.”
10. Ask yourself where pessimism takes you. When it’s a good place, go with it.

How do you deal with pessimism?

What does realistic optimism look like?

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Posts for the New Year:

Creating a Life of Opportunity - “Adding value creates opportunity.”

Five Ways to Find Your Future - #2. “Your future is about people not projects or accomplishments.”

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Christmas, Goals, and Deadlines

Deadlines don’t motivate until goals have meaning. People must personally own goals before deadlines create urgency, focus, decisiveness, and action.

Today is Christmas Eve. It’s the motivating deadline for millions of procrastinators. The goal of giving gifts to loved ones makes this deadline matter.

Application:

Throwing a timeline with deadlines at team members is a powerful tool but doesn’t always work.

Goal-ownership makes deadlines meaningful and useful. Spend more time discussing, clarifying, and if necessary, selling goals. Explain goals in terms that matter to them rather than you.

The people on your team who miss deadlines may not own the goals.

10 more reasons people miss deadlines:

1. Goals seem unattainable.
2. Deliverables aren’t challenging.
3. Poor time management skills.
4. Leaders who don’t follow through. Missing deadlines didn’t matter in the past.
5. Lack of emotional connection.
6. No compelling “why.” Goals are not tied to mission or vision.
7. Discouragement.
8. Lack of confidence to act. Fear of failure.
9. Perfectionism. If it can’t be done perfectly it won’t get done at all.
10. Deadlines are put off because they are too distant to matter today.

What strategies do you use to motivate people who miss deadlines?

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Don’t miss a single issue of Leadership Freak, subscribe today. It’s free. It’s private. It’s always practical and brief.

Go to the main page of Leadership Freak by clicking the banner at the top of this page, look in the right-hand navigation bar, enter your email and click subscribe.  Your email address is always kept private.  Note:  if it doesn’t arrive, check your spam filter for a confirmation email.