Overcome Your Fear of Failure
Here’s the bottom line:
You can't be an effective leader if you're afraid of making mistakes.
And, by the same token:
You can’t be an effective leader if, once you’ve made mistakes, you don’t learn from them.
There are plenty of bad leaders around who coast through life in their ivory tower comfort zones. On the one hand, you can't blame them. If it's not broken, why take the trouble to fix it and risk the whole thing blowing up in your face, potentially exposing what an incompetent leader you are? But, on the other hand, if you’re a leader with an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ attitude, your business won’t evolve. Before you realise it, you’ll be left choking in the exhaust fumes of the more effectively led companies roaring past you, sweeping up your customers and profits as they go.
“If you’re not failing, you’re not trying.”
Leaders can't afford to be complacent. Even if what you're currently doing is getting the right results, that doesn’t mean you couldn’t be doing a lot more to make your business better and get even more impressive results. It might be something relatively minor, like streamlining a work process to make it quicker and easier or shifting people's roles around so that they (and you) can make better use of their skillsets. Or it might be something more significant, like investing in new technology that would ultimately supercharge the way your company operates but will inevitably involve a ‘bedding in’ period that might slow everything down for a while. Or, going to the complete extreme, maybe you're leading a company that produces a popular product that, you can already foresee, is going to be made out-of-date within the next few years because your competitors already have a more advanced alternative waiting on the horizon?
In that case, as a leader, what would you do? Would you settle comfortably back into your ergonomic throne and think, "We're doing well at the moment; our competition won't be up and running for ages; I'll worry about it when the time comes?"
Or would you be calling a meeting of your department heads and telling them, “Business is going well right now, but if we don’t move with the times and innovate before our competitor does, we’re going to lose our lead and everything we’ve worked so hard for?
"As a leader, it's my job to ensure that doesn't happen. Even though it might mean making decisions that will be unpopular, risky, or may weaken my position as a leader if the decisions go wrong, I’ve got to do whatever it takes to head off this threat and keep this company at the front of the field?”
The fact you’re reading this makes me pretty sure it will be the second one.
If it isn’t, as a leader, you'd have already failed because you’re so afraid of making mistakes that you’re not even prepared to try.
The importance of accepting risk and failure
I’m not suggesting that effective leadership is all about making changes for the hell of it.
Sometimes, if you're completely on top of what your company and the marketplace are doing and it's evident that, right now, there isn't anything that needs to be fixed, that’s an effective leadership decision too.
Decisions should be educated, and the risks should be calculated, but, as leaders, we must accept there will always be an element of risk and failure in almost everything we do, and we shouldn't be paralysed by it. A little while ago, I watched a very long movie called 'Dune' that would make an excellent cure for insomnia. There's a line of dialogue in it which sounded very pretentious at the time but seems very apt now that we’re talking about being paralysed by the risk of making mistakes.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.”
When you think about it, that's often quite true. Fearing failure freezes us in our tracks; it prevents us from making the decisions we need to make to lead our businesses effectively.
Great line of dialogue. Still a very pretentious, pretty boring movie with far too much sand in it. Let's move on.
Change your relationship with failure.
No one enjoys failing, but anyone who's ever accomplished anything worthwhile has always failed. Usually, lots of times. They just didn't let it define them and stop them from doing what they had to do.
You can’t make failure personal.
So you attempted something, it didn't get the result you wanted, or it turned out to be a mistake, but that isn’t a reflection on your leadership. All it means is you took action based on what you believed was the right thing to do at the time (i.e. educated decision-making), and you didn't get the outcome you were hoping for.
Learn from the mistake. What did you do (or didn't do) that resulted in the mistake? What could you have done differently to change the outcome or reduce the risk? There's an interview I read with Richard Branson when he talked about how a PR stunt to launch Virgin Cola in the U.S. turned out to be a terrible idea and made him realise how vital it was to "pick yourself up, retrace your steps, look at what went wrong, and learn from your mistakes so you can avoid making the same errors next time."
In fact, if you want to look at the long list of leaders who have made very public business mistakes but still survived to tell the tale, Richard Branson has got to be somewhere near the top.
His first company – magazine publishing – didn’t make money. So, what did he do? He did a complete pivot into the music industry, launched a mail-order discount record business, and then grew it into a billion-pound recording giant, Virgin Records.
Virgin Atlantic almost failed before it left the ground when Branson couldn't get certification because his only plane was extensively damaged during the test flight. But, instead of giving up, he restructured his companies and siphoned off money from other areas to get the plane repaired and the certification granted.
Virgin Cola, Branson's attempt to take on Coke and Pepsi, completely fizz(l)ed out.
Virgin Cars, Branson's attempt to disrupt the auto industry, totally stalled. How did Branson pivot? His mistake taught him that he'd been focused on the wrong goal. If he wanted to disrupt the auto industry, he needed to focus on how cars are powered, not how they're sold. As a result, he ditched Virgin Cars and invested heavily in sustainable fuels instead.
I’ll stop there before this article turns into a bio of Richard Branson’s greatest hits and misses, but you get my point. Everyone fails, but the people who fail most succeed.
Don’t make failure personal. Use it as a learning curve and then keep going.
When you make a mistake, own it, and stop doing it.
Another big reason leaders are afraid to make mistakes is because their pride gets in the way.
They’re afraid to make a decision in case it goes wrong, and they look stupid.
Or, they make the decision, it goes wrong, but they keep digging the hole because they don't want to admit their error.
This is what's known as the 'sunk cost bias'. That's when we realise we've backed the wrong horse, but we've already staked so much of our money, time, reputation etc., on the horse that we're not going to give up it now.
In leadership terms, it's when you stick to a losing strategy or keep doing something that used to work but it's not serving you or your business any longer.
Leaders shouldn't be afraid to make mistakes. But, when they do, they equally shouldn't be afraid to hold up their hands, call that idea quits, and 'fail fast'.
Don’t be afraid to let other people mark your homework
As a leader, I'm full of ideas, and I'm always thinking about what's happening in the future.
But, on the downside, I’m also what CliftonStrengths calls ‘a very High Activator’, which means that when I’ve got an idea, I want to start doing it right now. I don't ask anyone around me what they think, I've made the decision, so I make it happen.
Except, sometimes it doesn’t happen, and it’s only been over the last couple of years that I’ve realised how much money that ‘not letting anyone mark my homework’ has cost me.
Effective leadership isn't solo leadership. We all need a support system or trusted advisor(s) to bounce our ideas off, so they can ask you the 'bog off' questions. What's a 'bog off' question? That's what I call it when I tell someone my idea, and they'll sometimes respond, "But did you think about it this way? If you have, you can tell me to 'bog off'."
I love it when I can tell someone whose opinion I trust to bog off because it means I've already thought what they're thinking, so there's a good chance my idea/decision is already on the right track.
On the other hand, I also love it (kind of) when they ask me a question that I can't say "bog off" to because that means I haven't thought that point through properly (or at all), and probably I should.
To risk or not to risk? That is the question!
There’s a weird thing about leadership. Once you’ve reached the top, you don’t want to risk making any decisions that might lose you what you’ve gained. But, even though there’s a risk involved in almost every business decision we make, there's often a much bigger risk involved in not making a decision at all. Playing it safe by being afraid to make mistakes is a very high-risk strategy.
That's why leaders should never be afraid to make mistakes.
