FAILURE IN LEADERSHIP

Marion Giddy - 12 August 2020

Many leaders I speak with, discuss the fear of failure as a driving force behind their visions, aspirations, and interactions with their teams.

Worry that they aren’t good enough, won’t be able to achieve enough, know the right things, or lead their teams ‘correctly’.  

When we have an idea of a ‘leader’ set high upon an aspirational pillar in our mind, over embellished with abilities and brimming with confidence, it is no wonder that as leaders, we might feel set up to fail. We can operate throughout our days, working tirelessly to avoid problems, prevent disasters, and in the more smooth times - wondering when the other shoe will drop.

What we learn about failure..

Change your attitude, develop courage to fail, begin again, keep getting up, be persistent, ‘fail harder’.  

These are some of the ‘inspirational quotes’ that may be come across, when seeking motivation to counteract failure. Handy screensaver motivational taps that we can turn on, when we find our spirit lagging, or fear rising.  Nevertheless, we all know they don’t cut it. This common mindset views failure as a risk, to be avoided. A threat, on the horizon, that a leader should be prepared against. 

Add this to the knowledge that biologically, we have a programmed response to threats, the fight, flight, freeze response.

Fight. Push against the resistance, rise higher, get stronger, until you cannot possibly fail any more.

Flight. In this way we find ourselves stuck on the hamster wheel of achievement, motivated by the ghost of failure chasing us, as we ever prepare to reach greater and greater heights.

Or.. don’t. 

Freeze.  The fear is too great, the risk too high, and procrastination sets in, convincing us that our achievements were never really what we wanted in any case.

However these fight, flight and freeze perspectives hold that failure is an end point. Somewhere that can be arrived at, a location.

One in which, if you arrive, you must then be, a failure.

At some point in our lives…We can generalise the perception of an event in which we believe we have missed the mark, to become our embodied way of being.  Failing = failure.

This perspective holds failure in one hand, fist tightly closed around it, fear and worry in the other. In an effort to control the emotions that arise from the basis fearing these two, we hold increasingly tighter. Controlling events to a greater degree, impacting our relationships, our time, our looks, our attitudes, our coworkers and teams.

We continue to act in fear of failure, based on a belief that it is possible to fail. 

The failure belief

This belief, that one has the ability to fail, then permeates. Working behind the scenes, it infiltrates the way we show up in our relationships, our leadership style, our personal habits.

As leaders the tendency to fear failure can lead us to over control, micromanaging our teams, systems and culture, whilst stifling individual autonomy and creativity. We want so desperately to succeed, that we work endlessly to create scenarios towards a perfect, ideal of what we should be achieving. The hamster wheel continues.

Getting off the hamster wheel..

Opportunity lies in our ability to become aware of the narrative we bring to situations, to the stories we tell ourselves, about the events that occur. As humans one of the beautiful and powerful parts of our make-up is that we are meaning making creatures. The stories we tell ourselves, about our external experiences, form the basis of our beliefs, and the ‘map’ through which we navigate the territory around us.

What we say to ourselves, and believe about failure, will bring its own fruit to bear in our lives.

“There is no failure - only feedback of information”* - This is one of the NLP Presuppositions, and it invites us to question the existence of failure, to cease making the meaning that it is possible for us to fail, and let go of the need to continuously judge ourselves against an imagined benchmark. 

The offer instead is to simply receive external information as objective feedback, that in the absence of meaning, can be used to guide clarity and accurate decision making as we continue to move through the experience of life.  This sense making capacity is an essential part of effective and impactful leadership.

As we become aware of the stories relayed by the voices in our minds and we begin to catch the storyteller in the act of weaving the failure narrative, we can ask ourselves ‘What new meaning could I bring to this situation, if I didn’t believe that failure existed.

Holding this new frame, we can then play, creatively and responsively to situations that require dynamic thinking, flexibility and compassionate leadership.  

Links:
The Coaching Room 2020. Retrieved from here.