Fear of Failure?

“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”

Thomas Watson, Sr. – Former Chairman and CEO of IBM

How do you treat failure in your company? The answer to this question will go a long way in

determining how successful your company or organization will be over the long term. In our culture we often see failure as something completely negative. We’re taught as kids that failure isn’t an option. Failure has the connotation that maybe we aren’t smart enough and is something we should be ashamed of. With that as our foundation it can be tough for anyone to come to terms with the value it offers.

Yet to be successful over the long term we need to embrace failure and think about it differently. Errors and mistakes are actually the positive outcomes of trying something new. In his great new book, “Creativity, Inc.” Ed Catmull, President of Pixar and Disney Animation, states; “If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders, especially, this strategy-trying to avoid failure, by outthinking it-dooms you to fail.”

Unless you set up a culture that embraces failure, most people will try to avoid it at all cost. I’m not talking about making the same mistake repeatedly. Failure in this context means the willingness to try new things, to look at problems and opportunities from different angles. To be able to experiment with new ideas and processes without fearing failure is the quickest way to new insights, learning and ultimately long term success. Fail early and fail fast is a mantra that’s been said for years in business, but very few companies truly embrace it.

If your culture is risk-adverse and failure-adverse you’re only guaranteeing that what’s been done in the past will continue to be done in the future. If mistakes and errors are seen as a bad thing, your people will avoid taking the chances your business needs to evolve and grow.

So how do you create a fearless culture? First, as the leader of your business you need to be able to talk about your own mistakes and failures. By leading the way, you make it safe for others. If you can’t be honest with each other about your failures, how can you ever learn from them? You need to change the mindset that all failure is bad. While no business wants a lot of failures, seeing it as another form of investment in your business is a great way to approach it.

By educating yourself when things go wrong you’ve turned an issue into an opportunity. Facing failures head on, without the need to find a scapegoat, reduces the fear in people and increases their engagement. Decoupling fear from failure in your teams might be the best professional development investment you’ll ever make. To get there you need an open and trusting culture. If you’re an owner that needs complete control or reacts negatively when someone speaks up about a mistake, you’ve just sacrificed any trust your organization may have had.

Our goal as business leaders shouldn’t be to avoid risk and mistakes. Rather, we need to constantly be on the lookout for fear in our business if we want to truly build a culture of innovation.

While trying new things can be frightening, think about what happens if we don’t. Being failure-adverse means we stop innovating. We reject new ideas because; “That’s not the way we do things around here.” Without constant creativity and innovation we unintentionally head down the path to irrelevance.