Ask Christa! What if Failure Didn't Exist in the Business World?? (S1E12)

Hi everyone and welcome to Ask Christa! the place where you can ask questions about how to work through business challenges and workplace issues. I'm Christa Dhimo and today's question is, “What if Failure didn’t exist in the business world?” 

That’s a really philosophical question, so I’m going to focus on those little failures in the workplace that nag on us, that weigh us down, that reduce our ability to perform or perform our best, that may be obstacles to getting the end goal done—because… there IS no business world where failure doesn’t exist. 

But how we think ahead to reduce the chances of big failures or how we make the smaller failures about improvement… and how we treat others in the face of failure… and how we interpret and process failure makes all the difference in terms of what we achieve.

Now, when we think about and talk about work in the frame of success and failure, a lot of it is tied to feelings: it feels GOOD to succeed. It feels BAD to fail. But—that’s not really the point, whether you succeed or fail… or at least, that’s not the point in the bigger picture when you are clear on your goals and understand the constraints you have to work in (and you can look to Episode 9 to learn more about that). 

In the business world, we need to be focused on the goals we aim to achieve and then whether we actually achieve them. Risks and changes and unexpected events come up, but we still need to think about achieving our goals. Do we say it’s a failure if we can’t stick to the original plan because a few things changed along the way? 

Sadly, some people might.

Some MANAGERS might—managers who decide whether you get a raise or a promotion, or even feel good about your achievements.

Those are people who can’t flex their thinking to see that how someone achieved the work and met or exceeded the goal is only relevant if the how leads to a bad outcome… when it leads to the bigger goal failing: it’s over budget… late… out of spec… non-compliant … unlawful… 

—OK, here’s my point: when we focus on success and failure as the key drivers to… success or failure, we risk getting weighed down on how the end result will be perceived instead of how we’ll get the end result DONE. 

We want to achieve SUCCESS!!! So we focus on the end goal and get it done by any means possible, restricting our better sides, stressing out, feeling bad… even though the end result is… GOOD?

Yup. Yup. that’s what we do. And we’ve been doing this as a society for… forever, but there will be plenty of successes and failures as you work toward a goal—what becomes very apparent is that with every success and failure along the way while working toward a goal, you have a chance to learn HOW to do the work, better.  

And if someone says HOW you do something doesn’t matter as much as WHAT you do, or did… don’t believe them. It’s just not true. And it’s old thinking. They may not want the encyclopedic version of how you did your job and achieved the goal, but HOW you work is really important, and successes and failures—often especially the failures—inform whether HOW we’re working should remain the same, or… change.

Now—I’m not saying we shouldn’t be focused on WHAT we are seeking to achieve—the  end result—that’s our North Star. We HAVE to keep our eyes on the target. 

But that doesn’t mean we don’t put ANY thought into HOW we’re going to get the work done, and this is when creativity, imagination, critical thinking, curiosity, fortitude, character, commitment, dedication, conscientiousness—all the things we seek in model employees—become critical to the work.

Unfortunately, the fear of failure often shuts down a lot or—or perhaps all of—those qualities: How to be curious. How to try something new. How to extend ourselves and be more innovative, stretch out more, grow. How to solve problems in a more efficient way. In addition, the failure that can teach us soooo much usually hurts us way more on the inside than on the outside. 

How many times have we thought we failed, only to hear others say, “wow, I that was great!” 

You see, as you work at something—as you work at achieving a goal—failure keeps us on track. Even when work is rote, when it’s routine, when it’s general and prescriptive and within the same bounds every day, there will still be failures. And in those moments when a failure enables us to learn and become better. 

Now, I realize it's not that simple and we all have had or will have or perhaps right now have a manager who loves to use it as a means to belittle others in the workplace environment, but that says more about those managers than it does about us or others, right? 

Most people think of success and failure as opposing and binary outcomes—one is on the far spectrum of the other, and that’s a very limiting way of working toward success, especially when your aim in a business is to achieve or exceed your goals… aaaaand, you’re going to have to fail in a few ways to get better at what you do best, be it in your job or as a business. 

And, there are far too many shapes and sizes of success and failure, especially as they mean different things in different contexts. So today, my answer is thinking about failure a bit differently, and reframing your focus toward achievement. 

I'm offering four short resources for this segment. 

The first resource is a powerful post called "Failure is a Wonderful Teacher" from Steve Harvey's YouTube site posted in July of 2020. boy, listen to that one. Listen to that one. It puts a lot of this in perspective. How "failure is part of the process," as he says, and  "every time you fail, you're one step closer." I could listen to Steve Harvey share his wisdom all day long. 

The second one is from one of my favorite business researchers and scholars. And if you've heard about psychological safety in the last few years, you can thank her for bringing this back into the norms of society. Her 1999 paper on that topic is not only readable for anyone, but still rings true today. I'm talking about Dr. Amy Edmondson. 

The video I've posted is called, "It Doesn't Matter If You Fail, It Matters How You Fail." And it's from November, 2023 on the Big Think YouTube channel. It's fascinating. She talks about "intelligent failures," as she puts it. And that's where you're set up to learn from your failures. It's an excellent, excellent video. I also included a 2011 article from her called, “Strategies for Learning from Failure.”

The final resource is an article in Forbes by Michael Lee called, "How Changing Your Perspective on Failure Can Help You Better Handle a Crisis." It was published in May of 2022. I've done a lot of crisis management and turnaround work, so I appreciate real world articles that offer perspective for how to reframe challenges so you can continue to motivate good humans to do good work.

Keep sending in your questions! You can submit them on my website, AskChrista.com, that's Christa with a CH. Sign up for my weekly Sunday Night newsletter called “More Answers” while you’re there. It’ll set you up for the week, and when you sign up, you’ll receive a free issue of the Survivor's Guide to Business Challenges and Workplace Issues. 

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