Page 211 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

200 HBR Leader’s Handbook

Great leaders embrace such challenges as a source of personal develop-
ment and a way to make themselves stronger for future opportunities.
If you’re serious about learning by doing, you also have to be prepared
to fail, just like the skier who falls on the slope and then readies herself to
do better in the turns and moguls that lie ahead. If you only put yourself
in situations where you succeed, you won’t learn resilience and adaptabil-
ity. You won’t learn how to get up, brush yourself off, reflect on what went

Learning from failure

For any organization to perform better, it has to know how to learn from
failure, as we have seen in our innovation practice. Learning how to fail
and rebound personally is similarly critical for your own career success
as a leader. As Ron and his coauthors explained in the HBR article “Re-
bounding from Career Setbacks,” a critical factor in surviving career
setbacks—such as not getting a desired promotion, or even getting laid
off—is the ability to step back, reflect on what happened, learn from the
experience, and then move on. People who spend their time blaming
others or feeling victimized are more likely to have another setback or to
fall short of their career expectations.
This doesn’t mean that you should lower your performance stan-
dards and accept that failure is always OK. Unless you’re doing an in-
tentional experiment where you actually want to fail a number of times
(because it tells you what doesn’t work), leadership failure is not some-
thing to plan for your agenda. It is, however, inevitable, particularly in
complex organizational settings that involve unpredictable human be-
ings and a volatile, rapidly changing environment. Even the best leaders
don’t get everything right. So when something does go wrong, they use it
as a springboard for learning. They reframe the experience around self-
improvement, so they don’t make the same mistake again and they also
have more insight into similar or related situations in the future.