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You need guts to take risks, knowing you’re bound to fail at times. But if you embrace failure as an opportunity to learn and improve, you’ll gain what former Google executive Jenny Wood calls “wild courage.”
Wood, a Boulder, Colo.-based keynote speaker and consultant who wrote “Wild Courage,” views her new career after 18 years at Alphabet (GOOGL) as rife with opportunities to fail and learn.
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Take the book promotion process. Wood initially sent out 300 books to companies and asked each of them to buy 100 to 300 books. She expected to quickly get keynote speaker opportunities. But her requests fell flat. She found that reducing the amount she asked them to buy got a better response.
“Even though it felt like I was failing, I really did learn something from every single email I sent out,” she said. “Failure is data. If you want to double your successes, quadruple your failures.”
Wood dealt with rejection in a productive way. You’re almost always far more focused on your mistakes than others are, according to Wood. “Other people aren’t losing sleep over your mistake,” she said. “They’re losing sleep thinking about their own mistakes.”
Don’t Repeat Mistakes
Learning from mistakes so you don’t make the same one next time is important, says Amy Edmondson, Boston-based professor of leadership and management at Harvard Business School and author of “Right Kind of Wrong.”
“It’s about improvement and future prevention,” she said. It’s particularly vital now to take that attitude. The world is moving faster than ever, so mistakes are happening more frequently. Make those mistakes productive by seeing them as learning opportunities.
That builds resilience, too. “Resilience is valuable because if failures and frustrations are going to be more frequent, then the ability to bounce back and move forward becomes very important,” Edmondson said.
Embrace Failure By Taking Many Shots
Wood essentially encourages people to make mistakes. Many people get nearly paralyzed by fears over what will happen if they try something new and fail.
“It’s better to learn from your mistakes than to waste time predicting the consequences of every decision,” Wood said. “Be fast and fearless. If you want anything big to happen in life, you have to take shots on goal.”
Wood recently led a class online. It was intended to be fully interactive. But when she got on the call, no interactivity was available. She and her producer were highly disappointed. “I said let’s both write down 12 things that were awesome about this session,” Wood said.
They realized participants raved about the session and Wood was able to give them even more information because she didn’t spend time with interactive discussion. “We both felt like a million dollars after we shared our lists,” she said.
Embrace Failure While Closely Examining Mistakes
Dig into failures, Edmondson says. Don’t brush them under the carpet. Examine them to find out what happened and why it occurred. “It needs to be thoughtful and disciplined,” she said. Consider a problem that arises on a work project. Take a team approach. Gather views from various people.
“That will be more informative to what to do next than any one of us on our own,” Edmondson said. Keep that kind of review from devolving into finger-pointing by looking at it as giving feedback rather than placing blame.
“Going forward is what matters,” Edmondson said. “What do we do next and how do we fix it and improve?”
It could be that the person at fault was afraid to say something. That means the leader needs to create an environment where people are comfortable bringing up bad news. Look at any successful leader’s full story and you’ll find it’s littered with missteps, Wood says.
“This wonderful mentor once said to me, ‘If you don’t have a few fouls, then you’re not really in the game,'” Wood said. “Successful people fail far more than most people do.”
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