The Need to Fail

Your future success, in large part, reflects how you dealt with your past failures.

by Neal Whitten, PMP, Contributing Editor

As leaders, we all have failed at something. We all will fail again. If you are not failing, then you are not growing. Failures can be small—not passing the PMP® exam—or large—your project came in 40 percent late and 50 percent over budget. Many leaders not only fear failure but allow failure to eat away at their confidence, their boldness, their passion and, ultimately, their overall effectiveness.
When we are bitten by the failure bug, we recoil—we want to go into hiding. We hesitate to take big steps with our dreams and endeavors; we become content with baby steps or no steps. We churn inside and nervously look over our shoulders. We cower at change. Many of our decisions are haunted by the possibility of failure. We become immobilized and substantially lose our effectiveness.
Maybe we're afraid to look stupid, of losing our coworkers' respect, to disappoint our mentors. We might fear reprisal, that we'll be marked a failure by others or by ourselves.
Ironically, without failure, we cannot grow, learn and master those things that are important to us. Many of the things that we easily do today, i.e., swimming, riding a bike or playing a musical instrument, are things that we failed at repeatedly as we were learning to master them. Many more accomplishments are less overt—developing leadership skills, working well with others and making things happen—but not less subject to potential failure.
Many so-called failures are not failures at all but instead are steppingstones to progress—to success. Without these steppingstones, we could never arrive at the many destinations and goals we have attained. In the end, we call it experience.
We have all marveled at the athlete who wins an Olympic gold medal, the master painter who creates a priceless work of art, the biologist who discovers the defect-causing gene, the Oscar winner, the Nobel Prize winner. None of these great achievers seems to be a failure. Yet each of these champions of champions failed many, many times before achieving their victory.
None of these people saw their failures as indications that they themselves were failures. Instead, they grew stronger from each attempt. They realized that they were producing results that offered them opportunities for learning, for assessing, for growing, for achieving. The failures represented lessons, not defeats. They were not even viewed as setbacks as much as necessary steppingstones to reaching some personal summit.
Great achievers not only learn from their own mistakes, they learn from the experience and advice of others. They know that no one lives long enough to make all the mistakes themselves. They know that the only real failures are the experiences we don't learn from, particularly when they are our own.
One of my favorite, famous-failure stories is of an American who:

• Failed in business
• Was defeated for the legislature
• Failed again in business
• Suffered a nervous breakdown
• Was defeated for state elector
• Was defeated for Congress
• Was defeated for Congress again
• Was defeated for a Senate bid
• Was defeated for a vice-president bid
• Was defeated again for Senate

...then became 16th president of the United States in 1860: Abraham Lincoln.

Being able to deal effectively with failure is one attribute of an effective leader. If you watch closely the leaders you admire the most, their careers may be littered with failures, invariably some large ones. Yet their ability to rise from the ashes and move on makes them all the stronger and more valuable.

Neal Whitten, PMP, president of The Neal Whitten Group (www.nealwhittengroup.com), is a speaker, trainer, consultant, mentor, and author in project management and employee development. His latest book is Neal Whitten's No-Nonsense Advice for Successful Projects.

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