When Leaders Fail

We have all failed at something in our career.  I recently spoke with a leader who made a career transition and did not do enough due diligence on her new position.  She is miserable in the role but does not want to be seen as a failure if she leaves it.  My own research with young leaders that fear of failure is the number 1 reason why Generation Y nurses are reluctant about stepping into leadership roles.

When I spoke with her, I realized that we don’t prepare our leaders for the possibility of failure nor do we have talk about it can actually be transformative. Yet, every successful nurse leader has had the experience of not being selected for a coveted position, failing to achieve a goal, making a bad judgement call or possibly being fired or asked to step down from a position.  I was fortunate in my early career to have some leader mentors that I could confide in without any fear of being judged.  I worked with one Chief Nursing Officer who was remarkable in her ability to identify the upside of any leadership mistake that I made.

While failure is inevitable we don’t publicly discuss it.  Yet, it is part of the leadership experience.  I listen to a Podcast called LEADx – it is a remarkably good and short podcast packed with leadership lessons.  One part that I especially enjoy is a question that the moderator Kevin Kruse asks each time “tell us about a failure in your career.”  The answers that his guests give are both authentic and insightful.  The moral is that great success is usually accompanied by equally great failures.

We celebrate our successes and most of our nursing journal articles focus on what is working in organizations.  As a journal editor, I am still waiting to see the first article on what went wrong with an initiative. If you never fail, you probably are not taking risks that will lead to your personal growth or innovation in your organization.  Reflection is important after failure to grow and learn from the experience.  Too often, leaders get into the blame game when there is failure rather than admit their role in what happened.  Some key questions to ask include:

• What happened and why?
• What key signs did I miss leading up to the failure?
• What were the consequences of what happened here?
• What did I learn as a leader from this situation?
• How will I apply any lessons learned in the future?

Our failures can be some of our best teachers if we pay attention and learn from them.  Fredrich Nietzsche once observed that “that which does not kill us makes us stronger”.  This is wise advice for leaders as they learn and grow from both their successes and failures.

Read to Lead

Learn from Failure  Harvard Business Review – Amy Edmondson

Fralic, M.A. (2011). Thoughts on Failure: Three questions to Ask.  Nurse Leader (9)5, 60

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