Why Good Leaders Encourage Their Team To Fail

Failure. By definition, failure means "lack of success." However, I would argue true leaders foster a culture of taking risks and in some cases actually failing. This is when you learn the most — when you are outside of the box — or outside of ticking the box.

There are plenty of incentives for employees to succeed at their tasks, tick boxes, and avoid failure. Theoretically, successfully completing tasks means your employees are productive — however, for leaders to be effective coaches, they should encourage their teams to do more than box-checking.

The truth is, if you measure your employees' productivity by giving them a list of boxes they tick, then things won't change and you'll stay in the safety zone.

Staying in the safety zone can become incredibly dangerous when your competitors are taking risks and innovating (which they will) and you're still in the safety zone.

Good leaders encourage their teams to take risks and even fail.

I'm not talking about the kind of failure where people are deliberately slacking or sabotaging or risking a budget line you can't afford to risk.

I'm talking about pushing the envelope. Challenging upward. Questioning the status quo. Doing something different to see if it works. Being bold. Taking risks.

I mean recognizing the value of taking informed, calculated risks in order to make progress — even if it doesn't always work out.

It's an archaic notion that failure is unacceptable. I believe that a total absence of failure is unacceptable. That means that nobody made a genuine attempt to innovate. To me, that's far scarier than someone coming to me and saying, "Hey, remember that thing I said I was going to try? It totally flopped, but here's what we learned from it and here's what we're going to do next." Even typing that sentence makes me smile because that's what I want to hear.

Perhaps you feel like you're already a leader who is tolerant of failure.

But are you really? If someone anonymously polled your team, would they truly say they felt comfortable taking risks and falling flat on their faces?

It's one thing to theoretically believe in risk-taking. It's another thing to create an environment where that's not only tolerated, but insisted upon. Embracing failure should start from the top. In meetings, don't just tell people what you tried that worked. Tell people how you failed and what you learned. If you have no failures to report, you might want to assess your own risk-taking ability. Show, through your reactions, that people won't be shamed or penalized unfairly for failure. Only when people know that it's really okay to fail will they start to gain momentum. Creative ideas come in part because teams know they can fail, pick back up and try again. I've seen this in my own team as we've witnessed growth over the last year.

Again, this doesn't mean you have to cheer for sloppiness or dropping the ball. Those are not the same thing as smart risk-taking and the failure that may result from it. The right kind of failure stems not from disregard but from enthusiasm, innovation, creativity, inspiration and brainstorming. The right kind of failure is about being bold and taking hardcore risks. The right kind of failure breeds success. And yet, even when we succeed, my team celebrates, of course, but also looks at what we can do better next time — what we should replicate, what we can innovate on, what won't work twice and what we can avoid to make things even stronger. That's because we operate in an atmosphere of learning and growth.

Ask anyone who's ever tried to learn to ride a two-wheeler or run an innovative, successful marketing department: true growth and failure are wholly connected.