The greatest lesson we can learn from failure

No one likes to fail.  I know I don't.  I'm a very competitive person who likes to win at everything I do.  But, the fact is that we often learn more from our failures than from our successes.  I became a better pastor as I worked through those times when I failed to reach certain goals.  As a leader of a small business and other endeavors with which I've been involved, I learned more about leadership during times of failure than I ever learned from my successes.  As others have said, failure really isn't failure if you learn something from it.  But, what is the best way to learn from our failures?  I believe it begins when we take a look in the mirror.

Mark Miller, in his book The Heart of Leadership: Becoming a Leader People Want to Follow (BK Business), writes, "Every time you experience an outcome that doesn't meet your expectations, look in the mirror and ask yourself how you contributed to that failure.  Ask yourself what you'll need to do differently in the future to get a different result.  Identify lessons from every failure - personal, team, or organizational.  A great question to ask is, 'What did I do, or fail to do, that contributed to this outcome?'"

This is not something most of us enjoy doing.  We usually prefer to blame someone else or some circumstance for our failures, but the reality is that we have often done or failed to do something that contributed to the failure.  Perhaps we failed to create sufficient urgency to make our proposed changes acceptable to those we are leading.  Maybe we failed to predict the level of opposition we would encounter if we attempted a task.  For newer leaders it may be an issue of not having established sufficient trust in those we are leading for them to follow us.  Maybe we failed to see the little things that should have warned us there were problems.  Leaders bear some responsibility in almost every failure we experience, and the greatest lesson we can learn from our failures is what we can do to avoid making those same mistakes again.  But, to learn that we first have to be willing to look in the mirror and accept responsibility for those things for which we are responsible.

Sometime back I wrote an e-book that looked at the mistakes I made that led to the closure of our small business.  The book is called Mistakes: Avoiding the Wrong Decisions that Will Close Your Small Business.  It is available as a Kindle book here.  In the book I discuss the many small mistakes I made that eventually led to us having to close our business.  Some friends who have read it have accused me of being too hard on myself, but I don't agree with them.  While many things did contribute to our losing the business, the ultimate responsibility of that failure rests on me and decisions I made (and didn't make) that could have led to a different outcome.  Writing that book was not an easy experience and could only happen after I looked in the mirror and asked the kinds of questions Miller poses in his book.  But, as painful as that experience was, I learned so much from it that I now carry on in my various leadership roles today.

As much as we may despise failure we can learn much from it if we are willing to look in the mirror and ask the hard questions of ourselves.  Use those disappointing times to grow as a leader.  If you do, you'll find fewer failures and greater successes in your future endeavors.