Checking results of a decision against its expectations shows executives where their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge.

—PETER DRUCKER

Chad, a bright and dedicated F-16 squadron commander, served his country with commitment and distinction. Yet he initially washed out of the pilot training he began a week after getting married. First-stage training was so easy that he finished second in his class with little effort. The lesson he took from that success—that he did not have to work hard to get by—nearly ended his career before it began. Predictably, he paid even less attention during second-stage training and failed. In his words: “I went from an air of invincibility to being knocked on my tail.”

He asked for a meeting with the squadron’s commanding officer (CO) to explain his poor performance and seek permission to continue the training. He realized that his entire career—everything he had dreamed of—depended on his being able to convince the CO that he was worthy of another chance and that he had the determination and ability to regain his place at the top of the class. “Sir, I’ve given you ample reason to wash me out of flight school. I apologize for letting you and the service down. After finishing second in the first-stage class, I didn’t realize how much more difficult this stage would be, and I didn’t ramp up my effort. I take full responsibility for my failure. If you see fit to grant me a second chance, I’m determined not only to pass but also to regain my position at the top of the class and serve my country in excellence.”

Despite seeing sincerity in Chad’s eyes, the CO continued to test his commitment: “Are you really up to the challenge of being the best in the squadron? After your failure, merely passing won’t be enough because it would mean that you’ll never be a top-notch pilot. In the past you have shown that you can excel, but how can I trust that you will do so again? What will you do differently?”

Chad responded, “I have always wanted to be a pilot—it is my dream and my passion. I know I can handle the training, and I’ve already adjusted my attitude to deliver the effort required to be number one. I learned that I must give the training and you 100 percent of my effort. If I’m not at the top of the class, I will resign rather than making you wash me out of training—and I assure you that will not happen.”

The CO let Chad repeat the training. He finished first in stage-two training, learned that focus and hard work produce sustainable success, and went on to excel in third-stage training and as a combat pilot. Chad was among the few leaders we interviewed who explained his current success in the business world in terms of both the failures and the successes he had experienced earlier in his career.

Executives universally say that they learn more from their failures than from their successes, mostly because they seldom examine success as a source of learning. Mistakes are an accepted part of growth and a powerful learning tool—but so is success. Learning from successes as well as failures enables you to accomplish more in each successive action. When you set stretch goals that require innovation and intense effort, your organization’s capabilities will expand—whether the effort is successful or not.

The Comfort Zone Versus the Learning Zone

Everyone has a comfort zone—you, your high potentials, and your boss. The zone expands over time as you face challenges and embrace the lessons they provide. The zone feels comfortable because you know what to do—you have been in similar situations before. Minimal learning occurs in the comfort zone because the status quo is the performance standard. Chad operated in his comfort zone during stage-one training.

When you push yourself and your high potentials to achieve more than you ever have before, you leave the comfort zone and enter the learning zone. The heightened emotional state feels uncomfortable, yet the learn­ing that occurs in this zone expands your comfort zone. In his second try at stage-two training, Chad embraced the learning zone and excelled. There is also a panic zone where people become afraid that things could go catastrophically wrong. That state is so jarring that learning is severely inhibited. Fortunately, Chad remained in his learning zone when he washed out of stage-two training and focused on repeating the training. Had he been in the panic zone, he likely would have failed the second time and been washed out of the program.

Effective leaders operate in the learning zone to expand boundaries and optimize performance. Regularly ask your people whether good was good enough or whether you could have done better. Evaluate results that meet or exceed expectations with the same intensity with which you evaluate those that failed. Expectations are not the Holy Grail—they are merely targets that you select prior to taking action. How much more could you accomplish if you leveraged successes with the same effort that you expend to avoid failures? Inspire your people to focus the same attention on expanding success as they apply to correcting what went wrong. By all means celebrate a good quarter or a good year; but, at the same time, have conversations about what more might have been achieved.

Conversations About Success and Failure

If you want your high potentials to do their best, do not make them fear failure. Avoid beginning conversations with “Let’s analyze what went wrong with  . . .  ,” which raises the unspoken “Was I to blame?” fear in everyone’s mind. When you chastise failure, people become reluctant to take bold actions, and the door to transformational actions closes. Incubate innovation by asking, “What went right with  . . .  ? What can we learn that would enable us to be even more successful next time?”

The unfortunate reality is that most organizations take success more or less for granted and punish failure. Why not eliminate the concept of success and failure and replace it with the goal of learning from every action you and your people take? That attitude encourages people from diverse disciplines to unite to support the common cause. It also breaks down silos and institutionalizes teamwork.

No organization systematically examines past actions more effectively than the U.S. military. After each training exercise or fire-for-effect engagement, military units dissect the action step-by-step to determine what worked, what can be learned, and what could be done better next time. They perform after-action reviews (AARs) even for missions that are unqualified successes. They look for ways to achieve victory more quickly, save more lives, and use fewer resources. Even in situations where lives are not at stake, this best practice pays generous dividends by uncovering opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed. Having worked with hundreds of organizations as employees, consultants, and coaches, we can count on one hand the number of times that successful operations (outside the uniformed military) were evaluated to see what could have been done better.

Chad told us how important pre-mission briefings to quantify expectations and post-mission debriefings were to improving future actions. During pre-mission briefings, the objective and strategy were explained, mission goals were prioritized, and parameters—sometimes as many as 250—were established to measure success. The briefings pushed everyone to look past obvious goals like bringing everyone home and to ask hard questions about what that goal would really mean if things went wrong. In briefings and debriefings, there was no rank. Whoever had the floor owned it until he or she finished. Everyone got to speak, everyone listened, and everyone’s input was valued. In discussing the mission, aircraft call signs were used instead of the pilot’s name to focus attention on actions and results rather than individuals. During debriefings, even when everything had gone perfectly, they analyzed what might have gone wrong, how they would have reacted, and how those lessons could be applied to future missions.

After-Action Reviews in the Commercial Sector

Today, Chad is the president of a multibranch bank that undertook a major technology conversion. When the bank last upgraded its systems fifteen years ago, there were ugly service disruptions, schedule slippages, and cost overruns. Borrowing techniques from his military service, he started the project by briefing everyone on the bank’s objectives: “We are expanding rapidly and cannot meet our customers’ needs without a technology upgrade.” To set expectations, he added: “Mistakes are a normal part of complex projects like this, so let’s hold conversations to correct them before they become customer-service issues. We will own this project as a team—that means no one will point fingers or assess blame.”

They set the completion date, divided work into phases, evaluated contingencies, defined success criteria for each department, and acknowledged that the path of progress would zigzag rather than follow a straight line. At the conclusion of each phase, they held a debrief to ask, “What did we learn from what went well and what didn’t go as well, and what changes can we make so that the next phase will go even better?” The conversations aligned the entire bank behind the initiative and resolved problems as they went along. Chad also insisted that everything be written down so that “next time we attempt a bankwide initiative, it will be even easier.”

Peter Senge, a recognized expert in the concept of the learning organization, said, “After Action Reviews are arguably one of the most successful organizational learning methods yet devised. Yet, most corporate efforts to graft this innovative practice into their culture fail because, again and again, people reduce the living practice of AARs to a sterile technique.” Done well, the AAR evaluates options in a way that enables them to be easily adopted in future initiatives. The more options you have and the more distinctions you make in planning, the greater your ability to take powerful actions in implementation. There are three clear benefits of letting your people know that an AAR (or similar process) will be used for all major actions:

• Transparency. The reviews encourage everyone to participate actively. People become observers as well as doers during the action because their feedback will be solicited during the review. They look for options that were not seen when the action was planned, they are less defensive and more open to feedback, and they consider events from all three conversational perspectives.
• Ability to leverage strengths. After-action conversations leverage strengths in addition to eliminating weaknesses. They focus on boosting future performance to higher levels by identifying and considering a wide range of potential actions.
• Culture of success. They create a culture of success by eliminating the word “failure” from the vocabulary. Failure need never be an end state: you have not failed when you learn from the results, especially when that learning creates the ability to achieve the goals next time.

The most valuable aspect of an action can be the learning it provides, regardless of whether the short-term goal was reached. Further, the process of evaluating actions as a team builds relationships, promotes growth, and facilitates better decisions and more effective future actions.

Let Go of Perfection

Vance, an avionics company’s COO and a PhD engineer, had a reputation for brilliant system designs and manufacturing innovations. During the early stages of directing preparation of a multibillion-dollar proposal, Vance made valuable contributions to the win strategy, proposal themes, and system design. Everything went according to schedule until two days before the proposal due date, when Vance came up with several innovations. He insisted that the ideas be included in the five-volume proposal, even though doing so would necessitate a major rewrite. The already exhausted proposal team worked forty-eight straight hours to include Vance’s changes, and then hand-carried the proposal cross-country in the CEO’s corporate jet to meet the proposal deadline. The proposal won, but not because of Vance’s remarkable innovations. In fact, the customer’s evaluators were concerned by inconsistencies in the proposal between the original design and the modified design—the last-minute proposal changes nearly caused the company to lose the contract.

Recognize the appropriate situations in which to operate in the management mindset and the leadership mindset. Nothing deflates high potentials faster than the perfect-solutions quagmire that grabs some otherwise brilliant executives. They acknowledge the need for action, yet they delay the start to gather more data and analyze more alternatives. Executives with extensive academic credentials—doctors, scientists, accountants, lawyers, and the like—are particularly susceptible to these excesses of the management mindset. We understand that perfect answers with near-zero risk have a place. Would you volunteer for a trip to the moon on a rocket that had a 90 percent chance of a safe return? We would not. We would insist that every executive be at least 99.99 percent certain that every item on the rocket would perform flawlessly. When human life is at stake, high levels of certainty are necessary, and everything should be double-checked.

However, most leadership decisions are made at substantially lower confidence levels. The opportunity cost of gaining near certainty is generally too high compared to the benefits (when lives are not at stake). Ask your team what would be an adequate confidence level, have conversations about the completeness and reliability of the information you have, and then make the decision and take action. Operating in the leadership mindset, let your people figure out the details as they move forward with the actions. Toggling between a leadership mindset and a management mindset in making decisions and trusting people is difficult for some technically minded executives. Yet they must do so to inspire their high potentials into action.