Learning from failure: leadership development through mistakes and resilience

¶ … willing and able to learn from failure is often what separates effective from ineffective leaders. All successful leaders have failed for one reason or another. Many successful leaders, like my interview subject Noel Gavrache of local restaurant Panache, state that the only true failure is not trying. Research substantiates the common knowledge that failure helps build character, clarify values and goals, and to perform better in the long run. For example, a study of students showed that the ability to learn from their moral and ethical failures proved "critical for overall character development, (Dalton, 2015, p. 71). Failure is as important to groups and organizations as it is to individual leaders, too. Starbuck & Hedberg (2001) found that organizational learning is based on reaction to failure, which helps to create a roadmap for the future of the organization. In other words, it is impossible to know what works for the organization before knowing what does not work. We cannot avoid errors until we know why they occur and how to prevent them and respond to them when crises arise. Research on math students also shows that failure actually enhances learning outcomes. Students who attempt math problems before an instructional lesson do better in the long run versus students who study before doing those same problems, precisely because the students who did not learn the material first were forced to learn from their mistakes and not from the abstract instructional information (Kapur, 2014). Similarly, failure helps us understand why the concepts matter, promoting deep cognitive changes that are more meaningful than the superficial learning that comes from repeated successes. The two most important ways to use failure to improve leadership vision include (a) planning for failure; and (b) proactively directing cognitive change.

In an interview, Noel Gavrache stated that failing makes one stronger in business and tougher when it comes to withstanding criticism and setbacks. As someone who now owns five establishments in three different cities, Gavrache is exceptionally successful in his chosen field, not only as a chef but also as a businessman. When asked about exposing his team to the idea of failure to prepare them for consequences of wrong choices, Gavrache laughed and immediately said that he had done exactly that. One day, he sat down with his team at Panache and told them that they were all taking huge risks breaking into a new market with recipes and a dining approach that had not yet been tried before in this city. He said that brainstorming the worst-case scenario helped to minimize fears by having everyone on the team voice their concerns. Holding your fears inside, claimed Gavrache, is worse than confronting those fears verbally. By talking about our fears to our colleagues, we can gain support and learn what strategies had been successful to team members when they failed in the past. Without those valuable stories learned from the failures of others, we would be less likely to succeed. Therefore, it is important to learn from others' failures as well as our own. Gavrache also advises entrepreneurs to read the biographies and autobiographies of other successful businesspeople in order to see where their failings occurred. Gavroche also joked that success would be boring if it were not for failure. On a more serious note, his statement highlights the fact that successes are rewarding precisely because they are the fruits of hard work. A successful failure is one in which the individual learned how to garner the strength to get up after a fall.

The key traits and characteristics that transformational leaders possess are similar to those traits exhibited by Gavroche, whose leadership style seems transformational in nature given the fact that two of his former employees now own restaurants of their own. Transformational leaders exhibit the ability to motivate other people through failures. Trust is also critical to transformational leadership. Gavroche's employees trusted in his advice, because of his credibility as a restaurateur. Carmeli, Tishler & Edmondson (2012) found a similar effect in research on executives: "CEOs can improve the quality of strategic decisions their TMTs make by shaping a relational context of trust and facilitating learning from failures," (p. 31). Inspiring trust and confidence are key roles of the transformational leader, who empowers team members to reach their highest potential by strategizing responses to anticipated or unexpected failures.

Failure is an integral part of life that contributes to leadership effectiveness. In fact, fear of failure or failure avoidance is associated with several maladaptive behaviors and dysfunctional cognitive traits including low self-esteem and lack of motivation. DeCastella, Bryne & Covington (2013) found, for example, that "in the absence of firm achievement goals, fear of failure is associated with a range of maladaptive self-protective strategies," (p. 1008). People who fail to try will never achieve their goals; whereas people who believe that one day they will succeed if they continue applying themselves, working hard, and figuring out what went wrong are the ones who will eventually thrive. Those who only experience success, whether through unearned privileges or some a fail-proof system, do not become effective leaders because they have no guidance to offer others. Leaders who had failed can help their colleagues and subordinates to adapt the most productive attitudes in any given situation. Creative thinking and problem solving can only evolve from direct confrontation with failure.