Chapter Thirty-Five
Learning for Leadership
Failure as a Second Chance
Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which in prosperous circumstances would have lain dormant.
—Horace
One of us met recently with the new CEO of a large company who was profiling his team of direct reports. As the CEO talked with us, he focused on the skills and background of each direct report. Impressed with the diversity of the group, we asked, “Is there anything that everyone on your team has in common?”
He nodded. “At one point or another, each one of us has been fired.”
The CEO said this proudly. To him, being fired was a badge of merit. His direct reports had been through tough times and learned from their experience. Because they had once been terminated, members of his team had grown personally and professionally. Difficult, unpredictable events had forced them to turn inward, address their flaws, and seek to understand how they may have contributed to their own dismissal. Termination had tested their resiliency—a trait crucial to leadership in competitive businesses. They were survivors.
These experiences are also passages because, as the word indicates, they take you from one place to another; you see the world and yourself differently after you’ve gone through the events and emotional states that define each passage. [See Exhibit 35.1 for a list of the thirteen passages that senior leaders mention most often and describe as particularly compelling or intense.] What you may not experience, however, is permission to discuss these experiences openly and share your insights with others because many companies today prefer to avoid addressing either these passages or their significance. You may have been encouraged to “keep going” and, as a result, denied yourself the richness, significance, and growth inherent in significant life and leadership events, even when painful. So although you may have shielded yourself from the pain and self-doubt that comes with the journey, you didn’t get to reap the true leadership development benefits. As “bad” as a passage may sound, it is not the event itself that hurts a career but how you react to it. It is how you handle working for a bad boss, being fired, or being acquired that determines whether the impact is positive or negative and whether you become a stronger leader or remain the same. Failure gives you a second chance to learn.
Exhibit 35.1. Thirteen Common Passages.
| Joining a company |
| Moving into a leadership role |
| Accepting the stretch assignment |
| Assuming responsibility for a business |
| Dealing with significant failure for which you are responsible |
| Coping with a bad boss and competitive peers |
| Losing your job or being passed over for promotion |
| Being part of an acquisition or merger |
| Living in a different country or culture |
| Finding a meaningful balance between work and family |
| Letting go of ambition |
| Facing personal upheaval |
| Losing faith in a system |
Failure of any kind tells you something about yourself. It grabs your attention and, if you can remain non-defensive, suggests that perhaps you don’t know something you need to know. Unfortunately, many people don’t capitalize on this second chance to learn. In working with many large global companies, we can say unequivocally that organizations aren’t fond of failure. Most large companies don’t give leaders the time to reflect on the experience or the permission to admit their vulnerabilities. In the wake of business failure, mistake, error, or disappointment, many leaders deny (to themselves and others) their own role. CEOs account for disappointing earnings by blaming “unexpected circumstances.” Senior executives cite consumer behavior, currency fluctuation, pricing, unruly competitors, or some other external event as a logical explanation for negative outcomes. Few leaders ever say, “I screwed up.”
If you aspire to obtain a top leadership position, however, you can’t continually scapegoat and deny your failures. Through coaching many successful, accomplished leaders, we have observed that personal accountability differentiates learners from laggards. Acknowledging and expressing the negative feelings that accompany failure opens the door to change.
We use the SARA (Shock, Anger, Rejection, Acceptance) model to describe the four emotional reactions leaders experience in encountering situations or outcomes they don’t like:
- Shock: You acknowledge your surprise that you messed up, others don’t like you, or you failed to meet your own or others’ expectations.
- Anger: You are furious that things didn’t go according to plan.
- Rejection: You blame someone or something for events and reject the information or your role in creating the outcome.
- Acceptance: You accept your vulnerability and acknowledge that failure and your feelings are part of being human.
Dealing with these feelings can be difficult if you’re left to your own devices. Appreciating them as important passages can help you deal with them effectively and facilitate learning.
WAYS TO CREATE A NEW IDENTITY
In one sense, “leadership learning” is counterintuitive. In The Leadership Pipeline, Jim Noel, along with coauthors Ram Charan and Steve Drotter, suggests that executives make “turns” in the pipeline—from individual contributor to manager, for instance—based on their success in their previous job. Each turn requires new skills, values, and use of time, as well as significant adaptation to a new role. The individual contributor’s skill as a salesperson earned him a promotion to sales manager, but the skills required for a managerial position are different from those of an individual contributor. Nonetheless, he still relies on the salesperson skills that brought him success in the past. This is perfectly natural, but it will prevent him from learning and growing as a manager. His instinct will be to rely on what he knows and to avoid tasks that require what he doesn’t know.
People often go through passages relying on behaviors and attitudes that served them well in the past. Passages, though, challenge your self-definition (“I’m always successful” or “I’m usually in control”). Undertaking a stretch assignment, living abroad, mourning the death of a loved one, or dealing with a bad boss all communicate to people that “you’re not in Kansas anymore.” It’s difficult to ignore the signs that life has changed and that you need to change with it. Of course, some people do ignore the signs. But each passage presents a new opportunity to learn and grow, and if you see it as such, you can dramatically improve your leadership effectiveness.
Learning from a passage, however, isn’t possible unless you let go of your past assumptions. In other words, you must admit that some of the very attributes, qualities, attitudes, and skills that made you successful in the past won’t necessarily make you successful in the future and that your old knowledge may no longer be applicable. Such an admission makes you vulnerable; you feel exposed as a novice after enjoying your role as an experienced pro. This is a tough psychological transition, especially because you may not even be aware the transition is taking place. In coaching senior executives who encounter a significant passage, we encourage them to admit their vulnerability as the precursor to learning.
Typically, you’re so caught up in the excitement of a passage or the complex issues it raises that learning from it is the last thing on your mind. For instance, you’ve just been given the task of turning a business around—a business that’s critical to the company’s future. Weighed down with high expectations and excited about proving yourself, you feel you need to be the expert right from the start, that you must hit the ground running. As a result, you plunge into the assignment, focused only on getting it done rather than stepping back and figuring out what you really need to know to do the assignment effectively and how you can maximize your first months in the new role. Companies such as Dell and Johnson & Johnson are beginning to intervene at this point and help leaders with this passage through transition coaching, but usually companies don’t do that. Leaders may receive advice from bosses or mentors, but the advice is usually technical in nature, confined to achieving the task set before them. It’s only when things don’t go well that they begin to receive the feedback they really need.
To maximize learning in each passage, be willing to give up your identity. For instance, this could mean no longer defining yourself as a star, a winner, or super-achiever. The process of evolving one’s identity is often unconscious and subtle and occurs over a period of time. But it is central to the process of learning. It may mean no longer wrapping your identity around your spouse (if you go through a divorce) or your home or neighbors (when you move to another state or country). Only letting go of the old identity makes it possible to forge a new one—as a manager, a single person, or a resident of a foreign country. To forge this identity, you’ll need to acquire new skills and beliefs, and this acquisition is central to the learning process.
EXAMPLE OF ADVERSITY AS A SPUR TO LEARNING
Andrew was a technological wizard—a brilliant guy who did well as an MIS executive at a Fortune 100 company and someone we encountered in a recent leadership development program. In certain ways, Andrew was the prototypical high-tech leader. He loved nothing better than spending time immersing himself in software design, emerging from behind his computer screen only to bounce ideas off other technically savvy colleagues. As sharp as he was, Andrew didn’t establish any strong relationships at work. It wasn’t that he was antisocial; he just was so goal-oriented that he didn’t feel compelled to have lengthy conversations about anything but work. As a result, people often felt that Andrew used them—milked them for knowledge and then ignored them on more personal matters.
One unbelievable day, Andrew was in a severe auto accident that left him partially paralyzed. For the next six months, lucky to be alive, he recuperated and worked on his physical rehabilitation. At first, Andrew was depressed. He had worked nonstop since graduating from college, and his partial paralysis and rehabilitation prevented him from returning to work. Even worse, he couldn’t work on the computer because both his wrists had been broken, and nerve damage made it difficult for him to type. It was a terribly frustrating time, and Andrew was filled with self-doubt and pity.
Gradually, he emerged from his funk. As part of the rehab process, he met other people with various injuries and began communicating with them on an emotional level; they talked about their fears and their hopes for the future. He joined a support group that served not only as a clearinghouse of information for people with severe injuries but paved the way for friendships with a variety of people outside the high-tech world. After Andrew regained most of his wrist function and returned to work, he found himself much more willing to talk with and listen to others. Though he still loved designing software, he was much more willing to help others when they were having problems with their designs. Before his accident, Andrew was never considered a candidate for team manager, despite his technical skills. After his return to work, however, he was promoted to this position because he had learned to relate to people in ways that fostered their development. Andrew’s organization considered emotional intelligence a critical leadership skill, and when he clearly had acquired it, it made him a prime candidate for managing the team.
Andrew was forced to learn because of the adversity he unexpectedly encountered. He took advantage of the learning available in his passage. Through reflection and conversations, he learned a lot about himself, helping him create a new, more effective identity.
THE VALUE OF FAILURE
In the broadest sense of the term, Andrew failed when he experienced partial paralysis. Specifically, his body failed, and at that time all his skills and knowledge were inadequate to deal with what he was going through. Andrew could have chosen to become stuck in his failure, and for many leaders whose careers do not unfold according to their own plans and prescriptions, remaining stuck is an unfortunate outcome. Andrew could have remained bitter about the bad luck that caused him to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Instead, he opened himself up to new people and possibilities. His failure was a catalyst for change and growth.
Most people who move through life experiencing one success after another are shallow. In fact, as professional coaches we can often quickly distinguish between senior executives who have encountered and overcome failure and those who have continually ascended the corporate hierarchy with no detours or unplanned stops. Without a failure or two along the way, leaders never have to move out of their comfort zones, adjust their identities, or develop their capacity for compassion. This isn’t to say that failure is fun or should be sought. Failing hurts. Too much of it can damage your career or, more important, your life.
Failure, though, can also deepen you. It gives you a sense of your own fallibility and forces you to reassess your point of view. As Andrew discovered, increased empathy is a common byproduct of failure. You can gain key relationship-building skills that you’d never acquire if your life were failure-free.
To understand how failure helps you learn, try the following exercise:
- Identify something significant you failed at in your personal or professional life. It can be anything from a marriage to a job. Be specific about the failure. Summarize the failure in a sentence, and be sure to use the word fail, for example:
- I was one of three candidates for the general manager position at my company, but I failed to be selected.
- I failed as a father to my teenaged son because I pushed him too hard and hurt the relationship.
- Describe how you felt about the failure immediately after it occurred. Did you blame others for the failure? Did you act like the world had come to an end? Did you question your ability or intelligence?
- Now move forward in time. Using hindsight, list any positive outcomes from the failure. Include any positives in the following categories:
- Skills you acquired
- Lessons you learned
- Relationships you established
- Identify how the failure may have changed you as a person. Specify traits or attitudes that you developed as a result of the failure. Do a before-and-after portrait of yourself, and note whether the “after” portrait represents a wiser, more mature person.
Most people recognize the value of failure only months or years later. Senior executives are often comfortable publicly discussing their failures that happened two years ago but not two days ago. Our goal is help you to recognize the value of failure in “real time,” so that when you’re going through a passage, you can capitalize on its ability to help you learn and grow as a leader.
David L. Dotlich is a former executive vice president of Honeywell International, author of multiple books on leadership, and managing partner of CDR International, a unit of Mercer Delta Consulting.
James L. Noel, a principal of CDR International, is the former director of executive education for General Electric’s Crotonville.
Norman Walker, until recently worldwide head of human resources for Novartis, has also served as the top human resource officer for Grand Met, Kraft Foods, and Ford Motor Company.