Own your own failures so you can fix them, disarm your critics, and build trust.
Own to fix
Playing golf, I hit one shot straight and the wind carried it right and out of bounds.
My playing partner said, “Good shot. Sorry about the wind.”
I replied, “No. I should have accounted for the wind. If I blame it on the wind, I won’t change anything I do. But, if I accept that I failed, I can learn and fix what I did wrong the next time.”
That’s the first advantage of owning your own failures.
Own to disarm
The second advantage is that it disarms your critics.
Forensic managers want to dig into the things that go wrong so they can assign blame. People afraid of them try to deflect that blame, pinning the failure on someone or something else, steeling themselves against the inevitable probing and confrontation, hoping their managers won’t dig in enough to find that it was indeed their own failure.
A far better approach it to go to those managers, report the failure, what you did wrong, what you learned, and the remedial actions you’re going to take before they are even aware of the problem.
I remember being told to go to my boss with good news, and run to them with bad news. An even better approach is to run to them with bad news and a way to make things better.
Own to build trust
The third advantage of owning your own failures is its impact on others.
We all fail sometimes. When others see you owning your own failures, they know you’re not going to blame them. It builds trust.
Three types of failures
Recall Amy Edmondson’s definition of the three types of failures:
- Basic failures: Stupid ones caused by mistakes and slips. Can be avoided with care and access to relevant knowledge. Known/consistent territory; but didn’t use our knowledge because of mistakes of inattention, neglect, overconfidence, or faulty assumptions.
- Complex failures: Have not one, but multiple causes, and often include a pinch of bad luck in a variable situation. Potentially catastrophic. Often preceded by subtle warnings.
- Intelligent failures: Good failures necessary for progress. Involve careful thinking. Take place in novel territory. Opportunity driven. Informed by prior knowledge. As small as possible to generate useful learning that advances our knowledge.
Basic failures. Owning your own basic failure hurts. There’s almost never a good excuse for inattention, neglect, overconfidence, or faulty assumptions. My out of bounds golf shot was a basic failure. I either didn’t pay attention to the wind, neglected to factor it in, had too much confidence in my ability to hit straight through it, or assumed it wouldn’t matter as much as it did. As long as I’m confessing, I should tell you I did all four and, in addition, simply didn’t hit through the ball. Bad George.
I then started paying more attention and did better on most of my shots after that.
Complex failures. By definition, you can’t be the sole owner of a complex failure. You can be one of the owners. Complex failures can be prevented or mitigated by thinking through possible scenarios and contingency plans. It’s not so much that you’ll think through all the possible scenarios, but that you and those involved will be ready to adjust as the situation changes.
Owning complex failures is more about owning potential complex failures than it is about owning past ones. Think through the possibilities in advance.
Intelligent failures. Owning intelligent failures requires courage, self-confidence, and persuasion. It requires the courage to try multiple different things, knowing that most of them won’t work. It requires the self-confidence to own the failure without thinking you’re a failure. It requires the ability to convince others to let you try things that shouldn’t work.
Some think the best way to avoid failure is to avoid doing anything different. That would be true if nothing was changing around you. But everything’s changing all the time. The worst failure is the failure not to learn. In the end, the advantages of owning your own failures are less about fixing them, disarming your critics, and building trust than they are about learning and growing so you can get ever better, ever more effective on your own and with others.
John Hall
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