There are two sides to every story: it was the best of times, it was the worst of times; you take the bitter with the sweet; every rose has its thorn. However, in leadership, we often miss out on half the story. Most discussions focus on what leaders "should do" rather than on what they "should avoid." The result? We talk about success, but seldom talk about failure.

In The Wisdom of Failure, we discuss a common theme among industry's greatest leaders--their most important lessons have come from trial and error. Unfortunately, many of us don't pursue the trial because we are fearful of making error. Jim Owens, former CEO of Caterpillar Inc., told us we actually learn more from our failures than we do from our success. He states that our most important lessons as leaders come from our toughest losses.

Mistakes are part of taking healthy risk. They provide us with new ways of thinking and give us new insights into how we can improve as leaders. Real failure doesn't come from making mistakes; it comes from avoiding errors at all possible costs, from fear to take risks and from the inability to grow. Being mistake free is not success. Still, we avoid challenges and hide mistakes. We don't like to talk about them and bring attention to them. It's safer to look the other way or sweep them under the rug. That's why so many leaders have the same struggles over and over again.

So, why don't we embrace challenges and become accepting of mistakes--to learn from them and ultimately grow from them? And if learning from mistakes has so much value, why is it taboo to even talk about mistakes in the context of business and leadership?

We are all evaluated on how well we perform our jobs. Not surprisingly, companies pay their employees to succeed, not to fail. The better the performance review, the better we are compensated. However, performance reviews inherently reward us on our short-term success and penalize us for our short-term mistakes. Rarely does someone receive a performance review spanning several years. And personal growth from mistakes is an evolutionary process. It takes time. Mistakes today usually hurt our performance evaluations in the short term. Moreover, in entrepreneurial firms, making leadership mistakes are not only amplified, they can destroy an entire company.

So what do we do? We avoid them. Consider the Thomas Edison quote "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Do you think he would have lasted in today's business environment? We have created an evaluation platform where successes are celebrated and failures are not. Remember, "failure is not an option."

IDEO founder David Kelley believes failure is not only an option, it is a necessary ingredient for success. Rather than punishing employees for failure, he and his leadership team encourage employees to be comfortable with bad ideas--one of the reasons IDEO is one of our most innovative companies. He believes that without freedom to pursue bad ideas, employees will miss many good ideas.

We live in a culture that values perfectionism. As children, we were told "practice makes perfect." We learned that making mistakes was bad, that we need to always "color inside the lines." We learned that to succeed we needed to "strive for perfection."

Perfectionism is one of the biggest deterrents of learning from mistakes. People become so fixated on not failing that they never move forward. They focus on the upside risk associated with failing, rather than the downside risk of not trying at all. How did Tom Watson, former CEO of IBM, react when one of his executives made a $10 million mistake? Instead of firing him, he viewed the mistake as an investment in training and development. Why? Watson realized taking healthy risk will often result in failure, and that a culture of perfectionism can be paralyzing to progress.

To advance our careers, we are encouraged to build social capital, to gain respect, and to create an image of professionalism. Managing the way others view us becomes larger than reality. The result--we become overly concerned with achieving the goal rather than considering the process--and the goal is to succeed. Rather than focusing only on the what, great leaders also focus on the how. If aspiring leaders are too driven to succeed, they may lose sight of what is most important. They become so enamored with success that they avoid failure. What was once considered a strength, eventually becomes a detriment. The more success they achieve, the more failure becomes unthinkable--and the downward spiral begins.

Original post:
Failure Is The Only Option, If Success Is The End Goal