Are you prepared to fail to win? Everyone wants to be a winner, and no one wants to be a loser. We’ve all faced failure in some form or fashion. Not a pleasant space to be in, nor one that we want our organizations to face. The question is, how will you as a leader address adversity and how will you approach this situation with your team to lead them to future success?

As a leader, do you allow your team to learn from their challenges or missteps, to emerge stronger and more prepared, while retaining their confidence to move forward?

As David Epstein alludes to in his book Range, get to failure quickly so you can achieve the success you are looking for and then move on. Don’t let small defeats cause you to settle for the easy path of retaining the status quo. You will find that this in fact is another loss, since you will find your organization moving backwards as others take the opportunity to progress.

This raises the question, is it possible to “fail well”? According to award-winning author Henry Cloud, this is very possible. In his book Necessary Endings, he reveals that “Failing well means ending something that is not working and choosing to do something else better.”

As an Integrator Leader, leverage failure to ultimately win by achieving desired outcomes –

• Pause to look at what occurred from the strategic as well as the tactical levels.
• Get your team to see what happened from different perspectives – from that of the customer, the organization, and the team.
• Use this as a teachable “deep learning” moment for you and your team.
• Help your team to embrace this as a part of the process, not the endpoint.
• Take this opportunity to adjust or make mid-course corrections.
• Lead your team to emerge from this to be more confident, to be unified, and to move forward as a cohesive unit with a greater focus on outcomes.

When missteps occur, as a leader, don’t take the problem back. This will only demoralize your team, causing them to throw up their hands, give up, and be more dependent on you moving forward. Instead, exercise what we call “just enough, just-in-time intervention”. Think out loud with your team about what happened: what worked, what didn’t, what they need to do differently, and what they need from each other to overcome their challenges.

While engaged in large projects or operations, the In Progress Review (IPR), or more specifically Mini Town Hall (MTH), a term we coined for an interactive process review, is invaluable to get multi-perspective views, realign the team (if needed), and to capture lessons learned. Conducting MTHs is even more important when faced with a failure or significant challenge.

No fingers pointed – rather a process to determine what happened right, wrong, and what needs to be modified or adjusted to move ahead. Getting the ball across the goal line remains the prime objective, it’s how to get it there that may be adjusted.

By pausing to reflect and to receive feedback from a variety of perspectives, the information can be turned into actions – all leading to greater outcomes. As a result of the MTH, often organizations find the need for midcourse corrections or adjustments. Not that the direction is wrong, but maybe there is a better way to get there or maybe you’ve slipped from the original azimuth that was set. Midcourse corrections can actually be healthy, and you will find that the best leaders use these occurrences as teachable moments. The result of the adjustment will be that the projects path is on a better track, the team has become realigned, and will be stronger as they take the lessons learned to build upon for the future. Expand upon each MTH so they are not simply one-time events, but as a critical part of the process to deliver the intended outcomes. Not taking time to pause and assess often leads to unrecoverable or costly failure.

It’s what you do with adversity or failures that matters – data, reports, or thoughts are only information, it’s by turning the information into action that will make a difference in producing your desired outcomes.

John Maxwell has said that “The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure. The question in life is not if you will have problems, but how you are going to deal with them.” He suggests that we “stop failing backward and start failing forward.”

We’ve all heard a ton of examples of failures that have resulted in success. A favorite is when 3M Corporation (Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing), when destined to be the best in mining minerals for sandpaper, failed to innovate an adhesive to cause sand to stick to paper. Thank goodness Dr. Spencer Silver and 3M “failed forward” – giving the world 3M Posted Notes, a billion-dollar commodity none of us can do without!

Maybe as leaders, we should learn from Thomas Edison’s viewpoint: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work” and “Failures are pivotal moments that force you to take a different path – a path to a better place.”

Again, the question is, how will you as a leader address adversity and how will your team approach this situation? As an Integrator Leader, are you preparing your team to win by leveraging failure?