I have succeeded and I have failed .. you have too unless you have the most boring life on the planet. ‘A’ list actors tend to try to hide their failures but that’s not easy given today’s accessible video libraries. The same is true in business. Looking into this further, I have witnessed hundreds if not thousands of employees succeed and fail. The real winners are the ones who turn lemons into lemonade.
Many successes are fleeting (if you made enough money at it you can hang around and tell the story forever). Thankfully for the rest of us, failures are temporary. I interviewed a CEO not long ago who was failing badly at his job. The board was on his case and the VC’s were asking for his head. He was being micromanaged and life was miserable until he turned his failure into a success. Naturally all the same characters now think he walks on water and some of his critics claim they always knew he was a winner … ah, hindsight, great when you can afford it.
Some failures are successes (we learn an important lesson) and some successes are failures (only we know the real opportunity missed). So this is starting to look like a complex issue.
We focus too much on counting or evaluating successes or failures when looking at individuals because we are goal oriented and we want to know who achieves their goals. Fortunately “Goal Achievement” is a learned skill. Learned primarily from experience. Very few people fall into the category of “Always wins” or “Always loses” unless it is a cut and dried occupation like sales. Even then many factors contribute to the ecosystem or environment that make a particular sales person successful this time around.
Failures are only valuable to the person who failed or thinks they failed. Only they can make something of it. An observer’s view of a failure is usually wrong as they rarely have all the facts.
I have seen brilliant people seemingly create a massive failure at something that they were just not suited for (and had to terminate them). Their aptitudes, life experiences and skills just did not lend themselves to this particular challenge. Or they took a calculated risk and headed down an unforeseeable wrong path and there is no way to rehabilitate their reputation in their current environment. We have all seen these people go on to be massive successes later on at a different challenge (Tiger Woods must really suck at something).
Massive successes are actually more dangerous in some cases. The worst managers I have met all had an early notable success of some sort and then expanded whatever it was that apparently worked to a point where they became completely dysfunctional – you know the type, megalomaniacs that are certain their way works but they should really be on some sort of medication.
So what does an “A” list look like in business? Just like in the movies it is someone who has learned from their mistakes, shows incredible talent and promise, takes on intelligent challenges, reaps praise from his (her) peers, makes it look easy, is professional and dependable, attracts great teams and team work, picks themselves up after a failure and makes something out of it but above all is a life long learner, sharpening their talents, recognizing threats and overcoming adversity.
I just sent a birthday greeting to one of these guys I managed a decade ago. The kind of person who may have a few failures on their resume but you just know they were aberrations. Chuck Yeager probably had a couple of bad days too.
In terms of risk management, watch for people who do not seem to have learned important lessons from any of their failures or fail every time for the same reason. And assess the challenges they have accepted; what were they able to do with what they had? In short, try very hard to find your own reference sources on the person and look beyond the headlines.
There is an old expression; there are three types of people in the world; those who watch things happen, those who make things happen and those who don’t know what happened.
Happy hunting.