So you failed. Now what?

At a McKinsey leadership event held in London, thirty women executives from diverse industries and around the globe were asked to write a story about a situation where something went wrong and they felt like a failure. When the women started to share their stories with the group, the first was in tears by the end of her presentation. Then the second woman began, and by the time she finished she was clearly very upset. What quickly became apparent was that even within this high-powered group of women—after all, their companies wouldn’t have sent them to this international event if they didn’t believe they had tremendous potential—everyone had a story about a failure. 

“What I realised,” said one woman attending the event, “is that what matters is not whether you at times fail—because everyone does—but how you deal with it. The people who succeed are the ones who know how not to get caught in a downward spiral, who focus their energies on moving forward and getting out of it. And that’s the secret sauce.”

When failure hits, most people don’t want to talk about it—which is only natural. Yet failure is becoming more common as the world becomes more complex and change comes at a faster and faster pace—to the extent that it’s hard to imagine anyone who won’t fail at least once or twice throughout a career. Traditionally, you earned a degree, built a career for forty or so years, and then retired by sixty-five. That paradigm is shifting. 

One way to think about it is that life spans are increasing, and soon it won’t be unusual for people to work for fifty or sixty years or longer. In a sense, you need to design for a hundred-year life. Over that time span, you are more likely to lose your job or feel stuck simply because you’ll be working longer. The point is, if you dare to do great things, if you put yourself out there and go for the big prize, you will sometimes fail.

When you fail, you experience one or more of an array of emotions—guilt, anger, insecurity, self-pity. Many feel that they’ve failed the company and their colleagues. Others bury their pain. Resilience is an important element of leadership.

Executives in these sessions learn that those who bounce back fastest don’t waste a lot of time asking why something bad happened to them. Instead, they focus their time and energy on understanding whether it was some behaviour, bias, or blind spot that was at the root of their failure, and then they adjust accordingly. They learn that the best way to bounce forward is to pause briefly and make sure they carry forward any lesson learned from the mishap. The business world has no lack of resilient leaders. 

Early in his career, Walt Disney was fired from an ad agency for a “singular lack of drawing ability.” Disney and Henry Ford both went bankrupt with early ventures, and Steve Jobs got a pink slip from Apple. He spent years in exile before returning to create what became one of the greatest tech companies in history. In one of its most celebrated cover stories, “So You Fail. Now Bounce Back!,” Fortune magazine told the story of how Coca-Cola CEO Roberto Goizueta appointed Sergio Zyman, the risk-loving leader who launched New Coke, the biggest corporate failure since the Edsel, to be his new head of global marketing. As Goizueta explained to Fortune, “We became uncompetitive by not being tolerant of mistakes. The moment you let avoiding failure become your motivator, you’re down the path of inactivity. You can stumble only if you’re moving.”

Fear of failure always leads to some form of ego fear. Ask yourself, “What would be the very worst if I failed? What would this say about me? What feels at stake?” Typically, the answer will be you’re not loved, not achieving, you’re letting others down, or not being good enough. The fear of failure can lead us to play not to lose. However, if we reframe failure as the love of learning in the service of a bigger vision, we start to take more personal risks in service of something bigger than ourselves. We start to play to win. Are you solving for avoiding failures or for learning faster in service of something bigger than yourself?

The best CEOs learn how to approach everyday failures, no matter how seemingly minor, as learning experiences. When you embrace your fear of failure, you can discover what needs to change and then create experiments to test, learn, and adapt. The idea is to focus on harvesting valuable lessons from your missteps, because to avoid failure is to avoid learning, and that can be costly in an increasingly complex and unpredictable world. Successful leaders calmly analyse the root cause of a situation, adjust their behaviour, and then bounce forward.

True strength of character gets built by admitting mistakes and turning them into lessons. People can fail because of circumstances or bad luck or making the wrong decision. But in some situations, leaders might do well to take a hard look at themselves. Perhaps it’s the way they think and behave that’s really keeping them back either from the next promotion or, in the case of a CEO, from reaching that next level of performance. That’s when it’s time to reinvent yourself.

Watch out for Leaders50

At Thinkers50 we are hard at work on an exciting new initiative. We call it Leaders50. This new listing of 50 inspiring leaders drawn from around the world will be published in November.

Leaders50 aims to ignite a global conversation about what twenty-first century leadership can and should be. It will celebrate and enable better understanding of the inspiring leadership practices and philosophies of leaders who are making a positive impact.

Leaders50 will be created by the Thinkers50 Community. At the heart of this process is a simple question: Which current leaders do you find inspiring?

Find out more about the Leaders50 at thinkers50.com/leaders50.