Truth 52. Failures promote progress

Companies thrive or fail on the power of the next Big Idea. While we think we may have a clue about what is likely to be the next sensation for our market, the chances are that we’ll be either surprised or disappointed with each new venture. It’s rare that our vision unfolds precisely as we expect it will.

From your people’s perspective, a lot of time, talent, passion, and ego are burned as fuel in the service of the Big Idea. Each idea is exposed to scrutiny, acceptance, or rejection. Some of those ideas are perfectly sound, with every chance of success except one: The timing is wrong. Other ideas are thunderously dunderheaded notions that deserve to be put down as discreetly and humanely as possible—with no outsider the wiser.

Still other ideas make it through to production and explode in a huge ball of embarrassment, high in the sky, large enough for everyone to see: your own boss, your customers, the media, your team. You may have some explaining to do to your bosses. But you also have a new responsibility to the people who work for you. At this moment, your biggest job is to ignore the bleating of lesser minds who are thrilling at your failure. Focus on taking care of your team. With your people, your job isn’t to save face. It’s to save heart:

• Keep your voice down and your head up. Apologize on your own behalf as profusely and abjectly as you want to. But remember that you’re also your team’s representative right now. Your job is to restore its dignity both as its representative to the rest of the company and within your group itself. No one on your staff is being paid to hear you rant and pound your fist. Keep your calm, and you will model the most important behavior for the rest of your employees as you, as a group, re-envision the future.

• If you have to point the finger, do it in private. Your team may do its best work as a group, but it’s still important to keep in mind that it’s made up of individuals who need to feel that they won’t be publicly humiliated for taking personal risks or making mistakes. You may feel justified in your anger and frustration to make an example of a single employee who, let’s face it, really deserves to be fired. If you do it with the entire group as a witness, the example you’ll be making is your own. And your group will learn only that you can’t be trusted.

• Recruit your team as consultants. Conduct a postmortem of the failed project and confer with your team as if they were esteemed, outside consultants. They are, after all, the world’s foremost experts on this particular project. They know better than anyone why it went wrong. Spend some time exploring the things that went right, as well. There’s learning to be captured on both positive and negative sides of this story. Show your employees that you see tremendous value in the (mis)adventure, and they will move forward to the next project equipped with greater wisdom.

Such an inclusive postmortem will also return to your team a sense of ownership of the project. It may have been ridiculed and criticized to smithereens by outsiders, but what’s left still belongs to your group. So as a group, your team should decide what to do with the remains. Maybe they just want to file it under “never again” and forget about it. Or maybe they decide to conduct a cautionary seminar on what was learned from the project, or write a white paper or article for a business management journal.

It’s easy for success-driven leaders to celebrate victories with their teams. But those are short wins that don’t necessarily result in deepened relationships built on trust. If you’re committed to being a mission-driven leader of an engaged team, you see that even failures are an opportunity to reinforce your collaborative culture of energized, freshly motivated individuals who respect themselves, each other (and that includes you), and what they do.

How you handle this failure will tell them how much risk they can afford to take with the next new Big Idea. Your behavior will solidify your team as a group who survived a big—if bad—adventure, and their shared learning will teach them to work more smoothly together the next time.