Remember in the movie Apollo 13 the Commander at the NASA mission control center said: “Failure is not an option?” Well, we often think exactly that when at work or in school. We portray an image of how we have it all together and are always succeeding.
Yet, there’s plenty of advice noting that a failure is definitely an option. For example, talk to any venture capitalist in Silicon Valley and they will tell you that if you are an entrepreneur then you needed to have failed (and bounced back) a number of times before they even consider your pitch. Likewise, most CEOs or senior leaders will point out times over their career that they have failed and what they have learned from those experiences. In fact, many say that sharing their vulnerabilities enables others to more closely identify with them.
Yet, today, young adults are having more and more trouble dealing with the slightest failures – getting an A- on a project or missing a few items on a test seems to be devastating for some folks. Getting negative feedback from a boss seems to shatter some employees’ self-esteem.
Clearly, we want people to succeed, but we also want them to learn that failure is a part of life and what’s most important is how to bounce back from those failures. We think of resilience as a person’s ability to bounce back from, learn, and flourish during obstacles and adversity.
You can’t develop resilience with just success in your life. You have to experience setbacks in order to build resilience, but the good news is that your resilience gets stronger each time you overcome challenges or obstacles. But, we have to understand what happened from our failure – reverse engineer it to see what we can learn from this experience. We have to understand what failure means in terms of new opportunities. Our leaders and workplaces can help us with this.
As leaders, we shouldn’t shelter employees from failures, but rather help them see them as learning opportunities within a safe environment. This is easier said than done. Our tendency is to immediately reprimand or place blame, rather than explore what happened and what they can learn from it. And yet, enabling them, especially new employees, to learn what happened and how they can move on is critical for building their own resilience and later success as employees.
We need to teach coping strategies in our schools, universities, and workplaces. We need to help people develop the right attitudes, behaviors, and a strong social support system. It’s more important than ever before since the world has gotten increasingly more complex. At work, we could help them learn a variety of strategies such as:
- Helping them to build stronger connections and relationships so that they have a support group. Setting up mentoring relationships so that they have folks to talk with. Encourage opportunities for coaching and counseling.
- Building a culture of giving or doing for others. There is plenty of research on the benefits of volunteering or focusing on others, which enhances one’s own happiness. Many companies have programs for giving back to their communities. Getting employees involved in these “give back” programs can really add to their own feelings of happiness and worth and often put things into perspective for them (i.e., my failures are not really that big in the larger scheme of life”).
- Teaching them mental agility and toughness. Teaching them how to confront the problem and learn from it. Also, mindfulness is a powerful tool that people are practicing to deal with the increasing stress at work.
- Teaching them how to reframe the situation or think about it differently by pausing, reflecting and trying to understand what they are experiencing. Talking about it with others can help.
- Sharing gratitude stories. Getting them to focus on what they are grateful for and what positive aspects may have come from the failure.
- Helping them cope by teaching life skills of getting the right amount of sleep, exercise, hydrating and eating healthy to make sure that they can handle what life throws at them. This would also help them in managing stress, their health and avoiding burnout at work.
You only have to turn on the news to see that employees, students, and others are having more trouble coping with failure. As leaders at work, we can build cultures to strengthen the resilience of our employees by letting them fail and bounce back stronger than ever before. Failure can be an option if we use it to learn life lessons.
