As part of this exercise, take the time to think through how you really feel – and if you feel differently after asking the questions above. In doing this, you may even recall a time when you had a “gut feel” that something was awry, but didn’t acknowledge or act on it. Or maybe you raised a flag but did not push it hard enough when your supervisor didn’t pick up on it. Processing your emotions during and after a difficult event is as important as analyzing the failure – because it will get you in a better frame of mind for the future, and may help you trust your own judgement better.
Several Pryor resources are available to help you though this learning process:
- Good strategic planning approaches help you both reflect and look ahead. Our Strategic Thinking and Planning seminar helps you deepen your decision-making and problem-solving skills.
- Developing Emotional Intelligence is available in both in-person and online formats – and can help you build the self-awareness and resilience to address failure more effectively.
- You can also search Pryor’s Emotional Intelligence library for self-guided options!
Reframing: Finding and Selling the Positive
It is also useful to ask whether and how you could reframe the failure – for yourself or others. We aren’t talking about ignoring a bad event or pretending it away – but it is useful to place the failure in perspective, based on what you learned or achieved despite it. Failure is often not an “all or nothing” state.
A colleague once shared that she struggles with the interview question, “Name a time you failed – what happened, and what did you do and learn from it?” It’s a common interview question, so it’s a good one to be ready for! She quickly clarified that she doesn’t want to appear arrogant or naïve by suggesting she has had no failures, but over time, she has learned a few approaches to avoid it or reframe it when it occurs. Here are her practices that make that possible:
- Over the years, based on past experience, through careful project planning and reflection, she has gotten good at recognizing risks and problems and mitigating them as she goes along. For example, it is always easier to have a difficult conversation or change a project approach before emotions are high when a problem occurs. She has learned to raise concerns early without fear of emotional discomfort.
- She plans for early wins in any project, and tracks and communicates small successes as they occur. She acknowledges that people rarely get credit for risks that are actually avoided, so she finds ways to communicate risk mitigation steps as their own successes – by showing how today’s decisions avoid future problems. This builds confidence and support in the team’s work and ability to look ahead, and provides a positive buffer for when negative feedback is needed, or something does go wrong.
- For a big or risky project, she implements early outreach and process steps, to both gain input and demonstrate her work to gain that input and buy-in from impacted internal and external stakeholders. As with communicating early wins, this indirectly cushions or blunts negative impacts on her team if something goes wrong – because many people were involved in the early stages.
- She always assumes failure can and likely will occur, so she always has a calculated back-up plan or alternative benefit or win to fall back on. When a risk is realized or a failure starts to look real, she immediately activates her Plan B and associated communication plan. She calls this “moving the goalpost and declaring victory.” This is a mix of operations planning and communications planning – she both has simpler, alternative approaches planned and know how to talk about those actions as benefits. Her planning always also considers back-up plans – she dreams and plans big, but always has a quickly implementable back-up plan each step of the way.
All of these actions involve the following key elements: constantly scanning the environment, looking ahead at what could go wrong and taking small and regular steps to mitigate risks and communicate about success. This builds resiliency and credit for her and her team – so when something fails, it is a softer landing. Many of these principles are also core to an “agile” approach to product or technology development or project management. Change management done constantly and well can help mitigate future failure.
Pryor Learning’s resources to help you build these skills:
- Our Creative Leadership seminar provides techniques to motivate and re-energize your team to develop a creative and collaborative environment.
- The Leading Change in the Workplace seminar helps you implement change management techniques with your own team.
- The Manager's Guide to Confident Communication seminar can help you communicate more effectively about successes and failure both internally and externally.
- Search Pryor’s library for leadership and communication for more!
Looking Ahead
When a failure occurs, it is important to both address the technical or operational problem, and to show you care and have a plan for the future. This requires taking clear and visible initiative – don’t just quietly go into your office until you make it all better! Talk about the actions you are taking and overtly highlight and demonstrate improvements. Learn about ways to build resiliency in yourself and others – don’t ignore the past or pretend it doesn’t matter, but balance realism about what occurred with a positive mindset. Talk about small successes, and share what learning has occurred.