I'm the Herding Tigers podcast. My name is Taz Henry. I am the founder of Axlon Kriya, also the author of the brand new book, Herding Tigers, Be the Leader of the Creative People Need, which is all about what it is that highly talented, highly creative people need from their leaders, from the organization and how as leaders, we can provide an environment in which they can do their best work, because we have to do great work. If we want to please our clients, we want to satisfy our organization's objectives, we have to do great work.
But what it takes to do great work when you're doing highly fluid, creative kinds of work that have to be figured out as you go, well, that's a big mystery. It's a big black box. And so here on the show, we talk about some of those dynamics that we can do as leaders to help our team be more effective. And one of the things we're going to encounter, if we are doing difficult work is failure.
Everyone loves to win. The accolades, the attention, the rewards are addictive. But if you're trying to do the work you're capable of doing, you're eventually going to fail. If you're leading a team of capable driven people who are stretching themselves creatively, you're probably going to fail often to hit your mark.
You will eventually fail, period. Now, if you're not failing every so often, I would argue you're probably not trying hard enough. No one wants to fail. Failure's not the objective, of course.
But if you're not failing every so often, you're probably not pushing yourself to do the kind of work you're capable of doing you're probably settling and you're probably sandbagging just a little bit. Now, after a failed project, many teams simply move forward to the next one without any kind of post-mortem. And this is a huge mistake. We don't want to talk about failure.
We don't want to address it. We don't want to deal with it. We just want to move on to the next thing. We want to keep a positive mindset.
But it's a huge mistake to do this. It's important that you seize failure and mistakes and turn them into growth moments for your team. Otherwise, people are likely to commit the same mistakes over and over and over again. Some of the biggest coaching opportunities that you're going to have is a leader are in those moments when an individual or your team as a whole has failed in some way.
So Mike Shieszewski, the legendary head basketball coach for Duke University, said in an interview once, quote, my defining moments have usually been something where I've lost or I've been knocked back, end quote. At the end of the 1983 season, Duke lost by 43 points in the ACC tournament. 43 points. Can you imagine?
The program was in disarray, and many thought that Coach K's career was over. Can you imagine? He's one of the longest standing legendary coaches in the NCAA, but many people thought his career was over. And at dinner that night, after the 43 point loss, someone raised a glass and said, here's to forgetting about tonight.
Coach K immediately stopped him, ordered the glass down, and said, he raised his own glass, and he said, here's to never forgetting about tonight. The following season when the team arrived on October 15th for the first practice, the scoreboard over the court read 109 to 66. That was the final score of the tournament loss to Virginia. Players recounted that Coach K wanted them to never forget how it felt to get beat so thoroughly, and to use that as fuel to give their best every day.
And since that day, Duke has emerged as a premier basketball program, and Coach K largely points to that defining moment as the turning point. So what does this mean for us to recognize failure to learn from it and to move on? Here are a few key questions to ask shortly after experiencing any kind of failure on your team. Now, it's very important that you couch this conversation.
It's a desire to learn and to grow from the experience, not as a trial of competence, because people check out if they think you're trying them for their competence. So here are a couple of questions to ask. Number one, why do you think we feel short of our objectives? Stop to consider what happened and strive to ensure that the team is telling a consistent story about what actually happened.
Often team members will have different perspectives on what led to the failure. And sometimes people are telling very different stories about what actually happened. You need to have one cohesive team story about what actually happened, make certain that there's one common understanding of what contributed to the failure to hit the mark. So the first thing is, why did we fall short?
And let's get to a common understanding of what actually happened. Number two, what did we learn from this experience? So try to capture whatever was learned from the shortcomings so that you're able to institutionalize that learning and prevent the same mistakes next time. Were there any assumptions that we're limiting your thinking, any assumptions you fell prey to?
Were there any faulty lines of logic that led to miscommunication? Was there a breakdown of process? Whatever the problems makes certain that the team understands where things went off the rails. Number three, what would you do different next time?
So failure is only a huge problem. If A, it takes you out of the game, or B, it's repeated in the same way more than once. Strive to never fail twice in the same way. Failure the first time is inevitable.
Failure twice in the same way is a function of poor leadership. Was the failure of one of effort? Was it one of decision making? Was it one of skill?
How do you avoid it again? Make sure you come to a common understanding of what you're going to do differently next time. And by the way, failures of effort require special treatment because that's the one kind of failure that is completely avoidable. So somebody on your team's phoning it in.
If they failed because they simply didn't put forth the effort, that's a totally different conversation. I'm talking about failures where everybody thought they were doing the right thing. They brought themselves fully. They were working hard, but they just failed.
So what are you going to do different next time? And then finally, as a leader, you can ask, if you were me, what would you do to prevent these kinds of mistakes in the future? So listen input from your team members about how you can prevent the same mistakes next time. Don't assume that they will share their advice with you unless given explicit permission to do so.
Until you give them permission to speak about what they think you should be doing, don't expect them to do it. You have to create a culture of permission. After a failure, team members are often hesitant to speak up until they know the temperature of the room. Give them permission to speak truth to you and offer their advice for how to succeed in the future.
OK, one final thought about this whole failure topic. Avoid the temptation to backward rationalize poor results as acceptable. Some teams try to find the quote silver lining in every situation. And they rationalize why their supposed failure was actually a success.
Hey, no, we really meant to do that. No, don't do that. Everyone on your team knows what really happened. And you're not fooling anyone.
Instead, highlight your failures and use them as fuel for improvement. Don't backward rationalize. You're not serving yourself or the very smart people on your team. So how you handle failure as a team leader will determine whether your team is willing to take risks with their work.
Use these moments of failure as a learning opportunity, as a coaching opportunity, and treat them as one more marker on the road to growth and success. Hey, I would love to hear your thoughts, your feedback, your comments about this. How do you handle failure on your team? Go for a send them to interact at accidentalcreative.com.
Until next time, be a leader and make that go. See you then.