Here'S Your Permission To Screw Up. Really.

Failing sucks, right? It’s painful. You can probably remember a time or two you well and truly botched it (often at 3 am while trying to switch your brain off and sleep — or maybe that’s just me). Mistakes were made that caused problems for others and generally screwed the pooch on whatever goal you were aiming for. It’s humiliating. Highly uncomfortable. Defeating even. And it very likely happened in the presence of colleagues, classmates, friends. That’s the worst part, isn’t it? Knowing others were witness to it. Screwing things up on our own is never as bad as doing it in front of others, but the bottom line is we are social creatures, so for the most part, our failures are usually pretty public (and that’s spectacular in a digital era when virtually everything we do gets recorded and uploaded on a global basis for all eternity). We do our best to forget about our mistakes because we remember exactly how lousy they felt. We like to call this “moving on” or “getting back up after we fall”. But that might not be the best way to think about failure.

Here’s some food for thought: Failure WILL happen. Really. It’s actually unavoidable. You might think that’s a discouraging thought, but it’s the most comforting concept if we can just manage to get past how ugly it felt when it happened.

Try this: Think about that last major project you had. Maybe it was in school, at work, or even at home repainting the laundry room.

Did it go exactly as you planned?

Even if the result was the way you had hoped, did the execution work out perfectly?

Were there zero mistakes, setbacks, or problems you didn’t foresee in the original plan?

Now think about your last 4 or 5 projects. How often did things go exactly as you intended? Probably not too many, right? How was the result? If your venture ended in disaster, it’s easy to look back and see the missteps that led to it. We tend to place the blame for a lackluster outcome on those failures throughout the project.

But what about those times the result was better than expected? You’ve surely had projects that still turned out pretty damn good, even though you had mistakes along the way. And then there are those projects that were so far beyond your intentions that you did a happy dance and ate a whole bag of Doritos (again, that might just be me).

Did you go back and attribute the successes to your mistakes too? Probably not.

But you should. And here’s why.

FAILURE IS NOT THE OPPOSITE OF SUCCESS. IT’S PART OF THE PATH THERE.

We learn to walk, eat by ourselves, and brush our teeth reasonably well when we’re kids. Along the way, we hit our heads on the coffee table, smear meatloaf all over the place and somehow get toothpaste on the walls. We don’t think about overcoming the mistakes we made while learning to do those things as “moving on”. Parents never tell us we should just forget about it and get on with our lives, do they? Generally, they wipe the sauce off our shirts and encourage us to try again. If you had rad parents, you might even have been sat on a lap with a juice box and told that screwing up a few times is a normal part of the process until we learn to get it right.

But somehow along the way, there comes a point when people more knowledgeable than ourselves stop telling us that those failures are completely natural learning experiences. There is instead chastisement and criticism for our failures and less encouragement to correct course in order to reach our goals. It happens gradually, over the course of school and friendship and love and work and life in general. Somehow we stop celebrating the small daily successes and instead bemoan the failures it took to get there. We stop normalizing those failures too.

And that makes us fear failure when we should be making it habitual. Just like learning to avoid the coffee table when we walk around the living room. And let’s be real. We know where the coffee table is, and we still stub our toes on it from time to time, right? And that’s ok. One day we’ll learn to move it 2 inches to the left.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

-Eleanor Roosevelt

HOW DO WE STOP FEARING FAILURE?

Unlearning fear of failure is not easy. It often depends on the reactions of others as to how we feel about our failures because our natural reaction is to protect ourselves. You can’t change how others react to your failure, but you can change the way you do.

FIRST, GIVE YOURSELF PERMISSION TO FAIL

This is easier said than done, sure, but it’s important. Because you and others around you will inevitably fail. But before you start thinking of every failure as a negative situation, you should know there is more than one kind of failure. And one of them is even deliberate.

Preventable Failures — These are those nasty failures that should have been avoidable, but somehow weren’t. These are by far the greatest cause of all that fear, finger-pointing, and uncomfortable office meetings we so desperately try to avoid.

Unavoidable Failures — You guessed it. These happened due to a series of events you likely had no way of predicting or planning for, even when you have all the frameworks in place to avoid the Preventable Failures. These are the hurricanes in your project. When they blow over, you just have to do your best to rebuild and plan for them later.

Intelligent Failures — These are the “on purpose” failures. Wait, what? Why would you fail on purpose? Well, to see what could happen and avoid it (or apply it) in the future when it matters most. In business development, we like to call that testing and prototyping, but it’s really just a lot of calculated failure. Like learning to ski or play ping pong or make a souffle. You have to try things you don’t know the outcome to in order to learn how they will propel or hinder your goal. Failure is a part of improvement — even once you’re an expert. Tony Hawk must have continually broken his body (and his spirit) on his way to becoming the beacon of inspiration and awe he now represents in the skating community. But he’s 58 and still trying to improve.

Let’s unpack those failure types for a moment. Two out of three of them are highly unlikely to cause the negative blame-game reactions that make us fear failures. Only one of them is the real focus for that. But ALL of them can happen. Failures will happen, whether we are prepared for them or not.

So how can we be prepared? There are a number of strategies and tricks for learning to prepare for inevitable cock-ups. Here are a few.

1) Getting Better, Not Getting Even

We know what it feels like when others react negatively to our screw-ups. When the finger-pointing blame game goes around, we all just pray the spinning arrow doesn’t stop on us. Remember that when the shoe is on the other foot. Other people’s mistakes can cause inconveniences for us, so the immediate reaction is to find someone else to blame instead of the best solution to the issue. Everyone does it — me included. It’s a habit that is instilled in us over a lifetime and a tough one to overcome, but it is changeable. Not right away, of course. It takes practice, but it will alter the way people react to your mistakes too.

My kids are 9 and 12 years old. They test my patience daily. I fail at this all the time, but we have mostly managed a culture that keeps us from yelling (and being yelled at) or finger-pointing. Instead of blame, we try to focus on solutions and consequences.

As an example, my son didn’t eat his lunch. Again. We had been going over this for months. I would yell at him, punish him, tell him he couldn’t have any other snacks until he ate his lunch first. Even explain that eating his lunch is what gave him the energy to get through the day. None of this worked, of course. All my finger-pointing and accusations (while well-intentioned and seemingly reasonable to me at the time) were nothing but toxic for him. It only served to make him afraid of telling me when he had made any kind of mistake for fear of getting in trouble.

But here’s the thing: When he gets older and starts making some real mistakes, I don’t want him to say “We’d better make sure my parents never find out.” I want him to say, “We should call my parents for help.” Also, my game plan was just not working. He still wasn’t eating his lunch. So I had to change tack. I asked him what he thought would help him to eat it next time. He said he would like to make his own lunches from then on. Because I had been making the same thing over and over and he had gotten bored with it.

And that was it. Instead of frustrated food accusations on the way home from school, we now have occasional discussions about new possibilities for lunch boxes. No more boring lunches for him (he is currently experimenting with the wild world of wraps), he eats well and even helps in the kitchen. No more inconvenience for me, and I can stop losing my shit over a damn sandwich every day.

Why a parent story instead of a business example? Because failure culture is an important part of the working environment my employees and I had decided on from day one — and yet I had failed to apply any part of it at home.

Failure culture is vital in how my teams choose to work to get through long grueling projects and day-to-day grunt work. When mistakes happen (and they do — often), we have a work community that doesn’t chastise, but questions why the failure came about and how to band-aid it while we adjust and repair it. We ask first whether it even makes a huge difference to the project rather than panicking about it, whether it has a negative (or positive!) impact, or whether it’s a show stopper. And yes, there have been cases when a mistake killed a venture. Also occasions when we discovered many of us had made mistakes we all somehow missed, and several instances when those mistakes made the project that much stronger by discovering them and including the new ideas surrounding them in our project. The main focus is on the mistake itself, NOT the person who made it. Making this a habitual part of our work culture means that no one fears their failures, but looks for solutions and better roads to take because of them. It also means no one hides those failures so we don’t have setbacks due to lack of information. (Like the months I spent tormenting my kid into eating his damn lunch when all he wanted was something other than ham sandwiches).

So why couldn’t I see this as a parent? Well, because I failed to see my pre-teen son in the same light as any other growing human being. I went into micromanagement mode instead of leadership mode. Because of that, I didn’t see my own failure where he was concerned. I focused on his failure. Another facepalm is totally appropriate here.

Would my son and I have been better off if I had instituted this solution-oriented program in the first place? Well, maybe not. Because I had to apologize for my part in it and now he knows I can fail too. He feels much better knowing mistakes are something parents make, no matter how infallible we seem to our kids. Oddly enough, he feels more secure knowing I don’t have all the answers. We both have permission to fail and we both have focus on getting better without placing blame. (When I don’t screw it up, anyway.)

The same applies to the people you work with whether you’re a leader or an employee. So if you’ve been in micromanagement mode with your colleagues, it’s never too late to switch to leadership mode. Failing (and admitting to it) may well serve to be the tipping point for creativity and responsibility on your team.

2) Action vs. Reaction: How Much Does This Mistake Matter?

We tend to react to problems emotionally because they cause us disruption and aggravation. In today’s world, we are more stressed than ever before, more connected than we arguably pay attention to, and more reactionary than we perhaps need to be. We live in a culture of SoMe internet trolls, constant online global bickering, media controversy, and of late, global pandemic, state of emergency, and war. These things are almost unavoidable unless we consciously choose to avoid them. Reaction to them also tends to be quick and emotional.

Immediate decision-making and hair-trigger problem-solving capabilities are still generally valued in our societal, educational, and work culture. How often do you still see job postings that require people who can “work well under pressure, constant change and very tight schedules” as if this should still be considered some kind of twisted perk in a working environment? While there are benefits, and sometimes even necessities, to a fast-paced work climate, an increase in failures due to speedier, high-pressure expectations is often not taken into consideration. Mistakes instead tend to get knee-jerk reactions, and since we still typically see failures as negative, the reactions are usually negative too. I have seen entire offices go into emergency fire-fighting mode over one customer mistake before they even question how big the fire is, who should be working to control it, and even whether there is a fire to put out at all. Usually, the first thing that happens in this situation is to find out who is at fault (see Step1 and insert face palm here).

Before reacting to a failure, consider first whether it is in fact a failure, what that failure truly impacts, and how might it best be dealt with. Usually, the people best to handle the situation will arise naturally out of that conversation.

And I can already hear those who want to make the statement that those responsible for the mistake should fix it. Fair enough, but there are some problems inherent in that philosophy.

Firstly, why was the mistake made? Was it because of a lack of training or information on the part of the person who made it? If so, do you really want that person solely responsible for addressing it? Secondly, the more you put pressure on the person rather than the failure, the less that person will be willing to take responsibility for things that might cause them to fail in the future. This means you crush all the “do” motivation they may have. For some people, just one of these embarrassing incidents will suck that drive right out of them. Humiliation and punishment rarely work to motivate people to willingly accomplish, learn more or contribute thoughts. Respect is earned, fear is instilled. Most people want to make up for their mistakes and are more likely to volunteer to do so (and even have ideas for solutions before bringing their mistakes to light) if you first give them the freedom to fail without shame or indignity. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting there aren’t people who just don’t want to accept responsibility for continually making the same mistakes over and over again, but they may just be in the wrong job, and usually they are far fewer than the former.

3) Agility vs. Micromanagement

Let’s say you’re skiing down a hill, and you can see a tree in your way. Your goal is to get to the bottom, but clearly the tree will keep that from happening, perhaps for a very long time depending on how hard you hit it. The obvious course of action is to avoid the tree, right? When you can see a possible problem, the best way to avoid it is to make a small correction and go around.

As a leader, part of agility is steering the ship, but letting go of all the tasks around operating it. If you’re the coach of the ski team, and you’ve told your team to get to the bottom of the hill as fast as possible, you would never chastise a team member for going around the tree. Sure, it may mean they might not reach the bottom as quickly, but it also means that a larger mistake won’t arise, such as a broken team member. The point is to have some flexibility in your team and projects. Leadership generally gets more buy-in than management. If you have given your team members some direction in the overall plan, give them to tools they need to accomplish the tasks and allow them to find the best course without skiing next to them shouting about which trees to go through.

This may seem obvious on paper, but the amount of micromanagement that still exists in today’s work culture never ceases to amaze. Here’s something to think about: 58% of managers reported having no management training before starting their position as a manager. This means more than half of managers have been promoted because of their employee skillset, but have no leadership experience at all, which leaves them utterly unprepared to lead complex, diverse teams or deal with failure when it happens. If this is you, don’t stress. Just the fact that you’re reading this means you’re probably willing to get the people training you need to create a dynamic team built on personal accountability and mutual feedback. And yes, however hippy dippy that may sound, it’s still better than being a babysitter at work.

Failures are necessary. It’s not about closing our eyes and “moving on” or “getting up after we fall”. It’s realizing you didn’t really fall at all. It’s succeeding through development. Once we normalize that more in our daily lives (and work), the feeling of having to get back up will diminish. Because failing isn’t the opposite of success. It’s part of the path there. In my experience, the most successful people are just really good at failing at the things they’re passionate about.

Now go move the coffee table.