We were meant to host our latest in-person Melbourne Breakfast for Leaders workshop, but you know what happened? Nobody came.
(That’s not exactly true, somebody did buy tickets just as we were preparing to pull the event, and we refunded them).
Womp womp.
The previous two in-person events – in Melbourne and Mornington – were huge successes, so we expected this one would be the same. But where would the fun be if everything went exactly as we expected it to?
Of course there’s a sting – failure is never pleasant. But it’s absolutely 100% a normal part of everyone’s experience. It’s just that we don’t often get to see this normal part for anyone else but ourselves.
How to lead your team through a failure
So this is what I’m sharing with you now – to normalise it, first of all.
But also to talk about how we deal with it as leaders. Sometimes our default responses to it can be:
- Find out who’s to blame immediately
- Assume blame and shame ourselves
- Make it all about the abilities (or lack thereof) of us and our team.
Keeping your head calm and level
Even if our minds do go in that direction, we don’t need to follow them. We can manage these reactions with calm and wisdom.
- Let’s look at what we can do better next time
- Blame and shame never helps anyone – taking responsibility and identifying improvements on the other hand, does
- Failure is not a moral flaw. Think about those Olympians who compete all the time and maybe never make the podium. Are they failing? I think not stepping into the arena at all (as Brene Brown says), that’s real failure.
We learn so much more from our failures than from our successes
When we lead, when we put ourselves out there in whatever way we choose, we will sometimes (maybe even often) fail. That’s a normal and valuable part of the cycle.
It’s what we do after we fail that really matters.
- How we make it ok for our team to try things and fail.
- How we pull the team together stronger.
- How we use it as learnings to inform future attempts.
Does that make you reflect differently on the latest thing that didn’t go your way, aka ‘failed’? Let me know.
Juliet Robinson
Leadership and Change Specialist
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