June 12, 2022

Failure is the Opportunity to Begin Again More Intelligently

S Success is going from failure to failure without a loss of enthusiasm. { Winston Churchill }
Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently. { Henry Ford }
Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street. { Zig Ziglar }

Failure is something each one would have faced in their life. Nobody can claim that he/she has not failed in their lifetime. Each person is bound to fail at some point, similarly people, community, nation, society all fail at some point. Great scientists, big business magnets, scholars all are bound to fail.

…as a leader one cannot claim that his/her decision is full proof and it is bound to give expected results... when things falter, then the leader needs to take up the responsibility of his/her action and then work out on how to correct the same and proceed…

Failure is part and parcel of our life.

So, it is a universal truth that people do fail at some point. We require a solution to handle the same. Failure can affect one from mild, moderate to severe forms. It can sometimes be a temporary sadness to the extent of leading to depression.

Failure is appreciable when we learn to manage the same and learn lessons from them and grow further. This can be achieved when one is ready to take the responsibility of action and then make an effort to introspect, reflect as to what was the cause of the failure. One has to take the lesson of avoiding the mistakes in future so that they can succeed in the subsequent endeavours.

Now let us look at this from the perspective of leadership. Leadership is leading our own life successfully and leading the people to be successful.

It is to make the best version of oneself and those following them. Leadership and failure management go hand in hand. I say so because when one leads a team which can be as small as a few members to as big as a big community. It is natural that one has to make decisions as a leader. All the decisions might not always be correct. As a leader one cannot claim that his/her decision is full proof and it is bound to give expected results. When things falter, then the leader needs to take up the responsibility of his/her action and then work out on how to correct the same and proceed.

So, for leadership it is important not only to learn from the failure but make one’s team also learn from the failure. As a team the consequences are manifold as compared to individuals. When the team succeeds, the happiness quotient increases, similarly when a team fails, the frustration factor also is more.

It is the responsibility of the leader to ensure that failure is minimum, but then if failure occurs, then the responsibility of the leader is to make the team understand the same and rather than playing blame games on each other work on ways to overcome the same and proceed with the learnings to succeed in the next attempts.

A leader should be able to make his/her team understand that failure has not made them weak, it is not a deciding factor to tell them that they are not successful. Instead, the team should be able to take the responsibility of the action.

This way they mature and grow as they have learnt to take the responsibility. As a leader one has to find out the reason for failure. One should be able to analyse minutely and be able to spot the root cause of the failure.

Failure occurs because of something not done as per the standards. To err is human. Here the leader has to behave very cautiously. He/she has to identify the root cause and call the person responsible in private and make him/her understand and take responsibility for the result. He/she has to ensure that such a mistake does not repeat again.

One has to use the strategy of appreciating in public and pointing out in private. Failure and success are the two sides of the same coin. Both success and failure help one to progress. Success tells us the way to continue to follow while failure teaches us a lesson as to which way not to follow. One has to know how to take up failures. It is purely based on individuals as to how they handle failures. I personally have failed many times in my life. I have never taken it to heart. I never thought that I am not capable of it. I always analysed and understood why there was a failure and then worked to avoid such situations in the future.

Failure doesn’t mean the game is over, it means try again with experience. { Len Schlesinger, The Global Leadership Summit }

I have not failed. I have found 10,000 ways that won’t work. { Thomas Edison }

When you take risks, you learn that there will be times when you succeed, and there will be times when you fail and both are equally important. { Ellen Degeneres }

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