Chapter 11

THE HIGH PRICE OF FAILURE

Why Trust and Credibility Are Too Important to Lose

Americans love redemption stories. We love tales of rags to riches, of people overcoming terrible tragedies and crushing failures to reach the heights of success. We love the second-chance, I’ll-prove-you-wrong storyline.

Chances are you’ve heard of Abraham Lincoln’s countless lost elections, or that Albert Einstein was told he was stupid for years, or how Michael Jordon was cut from his high school basketball team, or how Fred Smith’s business school professor gave him a C because his concept of a national delivery service (the one we now know as FedEx) had zero chance of succeeding. All of these stories are widely told. They reassure us that our own stumbles and failures don’t have to be final.

I suppose that’s a good thing. After all, these stories are true. And failure can be a great teacher, a springboard to success. Why not encourage people who are about to throw in the towel? Why not inspire them to keep going, never to quit?

But the fact is some failures are final. It doesn’t matter how much we believe in ourselves or how doggedly we pursue the dream, some failures permanently close the door. They slam it shut, even if we won’t admit it and refuse to give up.

I think of Darren. He once made a terrible decision and got behind the wheel after drinking too much at a friend’s bachelor party. He ran through a red light and broadsided a family’s sedan, killing a young mom and her daughter.

If you met Darren today, you’d be impressed. He’d strike you as a responsible, caring, and upstanding citizen. He’s become a committed Christian, carefully aligning his life with Jesus’ teachings. He’s a youth leader at his church.

But no matter how long he continues to take the right path or how much water flows under the bridge, there are some places Darren will never be able to go. He’s a convicted felon. He’ll never vote. He’ll never live out his boyhood dream of being a peace officer. He’ll never be able to pursue employment in a number of licensed professions. Blood on your hands and three years in prison will do that to you.

I tell Darren’s story to illustrate an important point. Not all failures are equal. Some are far worse than others. Some are impossible to recover from.

If you’re a leader, you can’t avoid failure. It comes with the territory. You’ll make bad decisions because you failed to size up the situation accurately. You’ll even make some right decisions, only to watch circumstances that are out of your control turn them into the wrong decisions. You’ll hire people you should have passed on, trust folks who prove untrustworthy, and launch programs and products that are dead on arrival.

All of these are normal leadership failures. They can be overcome. But other kinds of leadership failures are nearly impossible to overcome. You’ll want to avoid them at all costs. I call them “leadership felonies.”

LEADERSHIP FELONIES

The first and worst leadership felony is any kind of moral failure. We expect smart people to do dumb things occasionally. But we expect that honest people will always be honest, and that moral people will always be moral. Leaders who lie, cheat, break promises, or reveal the moral bankruptcy of their character have generally reached the end of their leadership road. Failure of this sort destroys the primary currency of leadership: trust and credibility. Without them, a leader can’t do much.

But a moral failure is not the only kind of felony a leader can commit. Several other leadership felonies are equally debilitating. They aren’t as spectacular or shameful as a public moral failure. But they can be just as damaging to a leader’s ability to lead, innovate, or make necessary changes within an organization. They occur whenever our failures are (1) high profile, (2) overhyped, or (3) repeatedly made.

THE SPOTLIGHT’S CURSE

Now, you might be thinking, wait a minute, aren’t there lots of leaders with a long list of failures before they finally succeeded?

The answer is yes.

But if you look closely, you’ll realize that their early failures were anything but high profile. In virtually every case, they occurred in relative obscurity. And keep in mind that their failures preceded their fame. The only people impacted were friends, family, and a few investors.

Your favorite entrepreneur may have flunked out of college and struggled through a couple of failed startups. But it’s only now that he’s rich and famous, bequeathing large sums of money to charity and serving on the board of the college he flunked out of, that you hear about it. It’s old news.

The same for the high-profile pastor who credits his early failures as the key to his success. We hear about his failures from the main stage of the big conference he’s speaking at or the bestselling book he’s written. At that point, they’re far away in the past, now known by many, but actually experienced by few.

Those kinds of low-profile failures are easy to overcome. In fact, letting people in on them can add to your street cred once you’ve succeeded. It paints an image of vulnerability and humility.

But let those same failures happen under the glare of the spotlight, and the response of the crowd will be different. It’s one thing to learn some tough financial lessons when your small startup runs out of cash. It’s another thing when you’re the leader of a publicly traded company that goes bankrupt, or a cash-starved business that implodes under the weight of too many receivables, or a church that goes broke because you convinced everyone that “if we build it, they will come,” and no one came.

These kinds of high-profile failures won’t prepare you for the future. They’ll destroy your future, because they squander trust and credibility.

Failure may be a great teacher. But make no mistake, its lessons are best learned in a small out-of-the-way classroom.

The high price of high-profile failure illustrates once again the importance of innovating at the fringe, starting out with both a game plan and an exit strategy, and using the language of experimentation whenever possible.

Successful change agents and serial innovators don’t mind failing. But they make sure their failures aren’t fatal to the trust they’ve built up over the years. They never confuse high-risk gambling with innovative leadership. They understand the high cost of a high-profile failure.

THE CURSE OF HYPE

Another common leadership felony is the overhyped failure.

If we hype something that succeeds, all is well. But if we hype something that fails, the loss in trust can be significant. And if we hype everything, it won’t be long until our words are white noise, the leadership equivalent of a carnival barker.

If your primary goal is to get something off to a great start, hype will work. But if your goal is long-term success (or the chance to try again should this idea not work out so well), hype kills. It, too, undermines trust and credibility.

I grew up in a church where every guest speaker, new program, and special event was marketed as a life-changer you couldn’t afford to miss. We all knew it wasn’t true. But that didn’t stop the people making announcements, printing bulletins, and sending out the newsletter. I’m pretty sure they thought it would increase attendance. But all it did was fuel cynicism. We all knew from experience that the best thing about these “world class” speakers and missionaries was that they could cure insomnia, usually before they were on to their second point.

Unfortunately, most leaders seem to be drawn to overselling. They want things to start off with a bang. They want results. Right now. So they fall into the hype trap.

But big crowds and enthusiasm aren’t worth celebrating if the crowds and enthusiasm quickly wane. It’s cause for grave concern. A fast start that quickly fades is a disaster. It means that the word on the street is, “I tried it, and it wasn’t very good.”

It’s far better to start out slow, make adjustments, and build momentum over time. Never forget that people won’t judge your church, company, or leadership by how you start out. They will judge it by how you do over the long haul.

That’s one reason why I always use as little hype as possible. It occasionally frustrates staff and people who wish I would push a new program, change, or innovation harder. But I won’t do it. I want the word on the street to be that everything I push is better than advertised. In the long run, that’s the best hype and marketing possible.

Here’s just one example of how I’ve resisted the urge to hype, and the benefits it reaped. It has to do with the way we launched our new main campus after spending nearly twenty years meeting in a converted warehouse.

The standard procedure for a new campus launch is to host a massive grand opening. It usually produces instant growth followed by a slow slide back to a new normal. Lots of pastors seem to see that as a big win. But to my thinking, it’s a huge loss when 20 to 30 percent initial growth dwindles to 10 percent actual growth.

So we did something different. Rather than kick off with a hyped-up grand opening, we took our cues from the world of high-end restaurants. We had a soft opening.

A soft opening in the restaurant world means inviting friends and associates to fill the place up so that you can stress-test the waitstaff and kitchen while also evaluating everything on the new menu. It’s a great way to discover and fix problems before real customers show up. And it’s usually more than a one-night deal. It often lasts a week or two so that all of the bugs can be worked out, not just the big and obvious ones.

For us, a soft opening meant absolutely no marketing, advertising, or press releases. Instead of encouraging our congregation to invite their friends, we asked them to hold back. We knew the first few weeks would be a zoo. And they were.

Everything was new to everybody. We had congested parking lots, chaotic classrooms filled with amped-up kids, and gremlins in the sound system. No one had their routine down: where to park, how to drop off their kids, where to find the nearest restroom or grab a cup of coffee, or anything else that they’d previously done on automatic pilot.

All in all, it was no big deal. It was predictable. It was exactly what we expected.

But imagine adding a couple thousand first-time visitors to the mix. That would have been a catastrophe, a guaranteed terrible experience for anyone checking us out to see if we were worth a return visit.

Now, if we’d decided to have a grand opening, I guarantee you that we would have put together an absolutely stunning worship experience and kid’s program. From the outside and to our leadership team, it would have looked phenomenal. We would have seen the massive crowds, jam-packed parking lots, sizzling programs and gone home thinking we’d hit a home run. After all, leaders love it when there’s standing room only. We see that as a great success. But I’m pretty sure that the people who have to stand don’t see it that way.

Grand openings and big campaigns can draw huge crowds. But for most people, they’re special events, sort of like annual trips to the county fair. The parking mess, long lines, and anonymous crowds are the price you pay to take your family there. No one complains because it’s part of the experience. But few people plan to come back the next week. Most of us wait until next year.

The kinds of people who are looking for a church home are different from the kinds of people who visit on a special occasion. They aren’t looking for a sizzling program as much as a place to connect and grow. For most of them, an amazing program can’t make up for a multitude of other things that are frustrating, annoying, or awkwardly uncomfortable. It’s like going to a restaurant where the steak is phenomenal but the restrooms are filthy, the service slow, and the dishes dirty. Not many of us would venture back, no matter how awesome the filet mignon.

Underhyping our grand opening resulted in much slower initial growth. The first month, we jumped up only a few hundred. But one year later, we’d grown by well over a thousand. Better yet, we didn’t have a long list of people who had tried it once when we didn’t know what we were doing and decided that they’d never try it again.

Leaders build trust and credibility by constantly underpromising and overdelivering. A pattern of overhyping does the opposite. It undercuts trust, making it nearly impossible to push through major innovation or change, because when it’s time to step forward and say, “Trust me on this one,” no one does anymore.

THE CURSE OF LEADERSHIP ADHD

A third leadership felony is repeated failure.

I’m not talking here about a history of colossal failures. When it comes to spectacular failure, most leaders and leadership teams never get a second chance. It’s one and done. I’m talking about a history of midsized failures, the kind that are most often the result of a bad case of leadership ADHD: lots of things are started and nothing is finished.

We’ve all seen leaders who can’t resist a new idea.

Some are readers. They want to reengineer the entire company every time a new management technique makes the New York Times bestsellers list.

Some are conference junkies. They come back from every seminar or conference fired up about a new vision and strategy.

Some are simply manic. They come up with a plethora of ideas all on their own — all at once.

But all of these folks have one thing in common: a tired and confused staff. No one knows what butterfly they’re supposed to be chasing.

This type of an-idea-a-minute leadership can be exhilarating initially, especially when a charismatic leader with a gift for selling is at the helm. Such leaders often have an innate ability to make every idea seem like the next big thing. There’s never a trace of doubt.

But after awhile, most people figure it out. Instead of charging off to chase the latest butterfly, they feign agreement, but do nothing. They’ve learned that “this too shall pass.” So they keep on doing whatever they were doing before, while the newbies who haven’t figured it out yet drop everything to jump on the latest bandwagon.

Once the default response to a new idea becomes “this too will pass,” a leader’s ability to innovate or implement significant change is pretty much done. When your staff sets up an office pool to see how long this latest idea or program will last, you’ve become a leader without followers.

Ironically, ADHD leadership is not that far from innovative leadership. It’s just a few degrees off. But they are important degrees.

Both try lots of stuff. But innovative leadership tries it in an experimental mode. Nothing is oversold. Everything is subservient to, and judged by, its impact on the mission. (And the mission never changes. No one wonders, “What’s really important around here?”)

In contrast, leaders with leadership ADHD never slow down to experiment. Every idea that passes through their heads — or that seems to work elsewhere — is pursued full speed ahead. It’s the only speed they know. As for the mission, it’s ever changing, the only constant being, “Catch that butterfly!” at least until a new one comes along.

It’s the difference between Jack in the Box and In-N-Out Burger. (Humor me, I live in Southern California, birthplace of the famous In-N-Out chain.)

In-N-Out never changes its menu and seldom advertises. Everyone knows that if you want a great burger, fries, and a drink, head on over to In-N-Out. That’s all they do. You can’t get a salad. You can’t get a taco. But you can get a great burger, fries, and a drink.

Jack, on the other hand, always has a new item on the menu and lots of funny commercials. But he’s usually so busy marketing his latest peanut-butter, bacon, and grilled-jalapeno sandwich that he never seems to notice that the cheeseburgers and fries are disgusting.

That’s what happens when leadership ADHD takes over. It results in a constant stream of new initiatives and failed projects that eventually numbs everyone to the importance of the core items on the menu.

Any of these three leadership felonies (high-profile failure, overhyped failure, and repeated failure) will sabotage innovation. That’s why a wise leader and leadership team avoid them at all costs.

If you are a leader, there is no way to avoid failure. And there is no way to succeed without trying lots of stuff (much of which won’t work). But you can do so without committing any of these leadership felonies if you learn the jujitsu of the serial innovator: always lead with a low-profile experiment, undersell whenever possible, and avoid anything that looks or smells like leadership ADHD.