The Advisor’s Corner – Can Failure Be My Friend?

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FailureQuestion:

How can I stop being so worried about failing?

StrategyDriven Response: (by Roxi Hewertson, StrategyDriven Principal Contributor)

Too often, our self-worth and confidence are all tied up with having to succeed all the time at everything. No one succeeds at anything, even their best skill set, all the time! Absolutely NO ONE. Think about it. Thomas Edison had it right when he said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

To jump-start an internal paradigm shift about failure, consider these 6 ways to lead using failure as a tool.

  1. SAFETY: make it safe for people to experiment and fail within reasonable ranges.
  2. AGILITY: expect and encourage agility and flexibility to move from a non-working idea to a possible one.
  3. LISTEN and encourage fast feedback on results, concerns, no matter whose idea it is.
  4. LEARN: consider every failure, every mistake, to be a learning opportunity.
  5. TEST: pilot test new ideas and projects and welcome mistakes and failures that show up.
  6. SHARE: what you’ve learned and the mistakes you’ve made to help prevent repeats and others having to re-invent your wheel.

The fear of failure often runs a close second to the fear of dying for a lot of people. Consider this – the fear of giving feedback to your boss equates, for some, to dying, which is… failing to live. Let me prove it to you. The under-a-second internal dialogue goes like this: “If I give my boss feedback, he/she might not like it and fire me; if I’m fired I won’t have any money; if I don’t have any money, I can’t buy food; if I don’t have food, I’ll die.” Snap! Just like that we’ve equated the risk of telling our truth to the boss to… dying. Wow! How did that happen? It happens because the amygdala in our brain sends us all kinds of fear signals, rational or not. Unless we stop, pay attention, and put other parts of our brain to work, we’ll keep letting fear of failure rule too much in our lives.

All failures are not equal. While some carry more baggage than others, they can also carry more opportunity. It’s a choice point every time we and/or those we lead, ‘fail.’ How do we choose to respond? What good can we gain from our failures?

It’s up to each of us to choose whether or not to make a paradigm shift. We know it’s impossible to experience joy with out knowing sadness, or appreciate the calm without ever having seen the storm. We often tell ourselves that if we don’t risk much we can’t fail much. Is that really true? Well, it depends on what you want and need out of your relationships and career. The phrase, “No pain, no gain,” has it’s roots in this very premise.

We can choose to look at failures, at least in our daily lives, as life practice, learning, a pilot project, as experimentation, or even a legitimate part of any innovation process. Failure can be our friend when we take another, deeper look. After all, when children learn to walk and talk, they fail constantly. We happily cheer their successes, but let’s remember, it’s all those failures that got them up on two feet in the end.

About the Author

Leadership authority Roxana (Roxi) Hewertson is a no-nonsense business veteran revered for her nuts-and-bolts, tell-it-like-it-is approach and practical, out-of-the-box insights that help both emerging and expert managers, executives and owners boost quantifiable job performance in various mission critical facets of business. Through AskRoxi.com, Roxi — “the Dear Abby of Leadership” — imparts invaluable free advice to managers and leaders at all levels, from the bullpen to the boardroom, to help them solve problems, become more effective and realize a higher measure of business and career success.

The StrategyDriven website was created to provide members of our community with insights to the actions that help create the shared vision, focus, and commitment needed to improve organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results. We look forward to answering your strategic planning and tactical business execution questions. Please email your questions to [email protected].

The Advisor’s Corner – Is Burnout a Reality?

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BurnoutQuestion:

Is ‘burnout’ a reality, or am I just being a whiner?

StrategyDriven Response: (by Roxi Hewertson, StrategyDriven Principal Contributor)

It’s true that burnout behaviors can look a lot like victim behaviors. However, burnout is a real state of mind and can be debilitating in many ways. If you are trying to decide whether or not you are simply whining or at risk of burnout, consider this: You know you are toast when you’re always exhausted, not laughing, highly critical or cynical, disengaged, or overwhelmed. We can burnout when we’re not feeling appreciated, when “it isn’t fair,” when work is meaningless, when we have values dissonance, and when we’re bored. Sometimes we can ‘manage up’ and work with our boss or manage differently with others to mitigate the root causes of our burnout. Sometimes, we just need to take control where we have control.

The best and fastest way to move from victim to victor is to take control. In our society, we have far more we control over our lives than we think we do. We control our attitude, behaviors, choices, what we say and do and to whom we say it. By strengthening and filling up our personal resilience ‘tank’ we can take back control over our lives one big or little chunk at a time. These are some relatively simple strategies that really do work. I recommend starting with number one and begin to add another and another without leaving any behind.

  1. Believe in yourself – remind yourself that you’ve solved many, many problems before and will do so again
  2. Identify accurately the root cause of your pain
  3. Reach out to others – it’s not a weakness to ask for input, and help from people you trust
  4. Find your empathy and compassion – acts of grace will change your body chemistry!
  5. Control instant gratification urges that cause you harm – mad shopping, eating, drinking, quitting in a huff…
  6. Stay calm vs. becoming reactive
  7. Laugh as much as you can in as many ways you can – movies, cartoons, jokes, friends… whatever brings you joy

Growing your resilience is a process not a trait. We’ve all bounced back from tough things in our lives, so you do know how to do it. The problem is, we forget our wins when we are feeling burned out. It’s time to remember how much you’ve achieved in your life and perhaps it just might be the right time to reimagine what will make you happy, including what is truly meaningful to you. Focusing on what IS working for you right now, and what you want in the future can help jump start your journey back into the light.

About the Author

Leadership authority Roxana (Roxi) Hewertson is a no-nonsense business veteran revered for her nuts-and-bolts, tell-it-like-it-is approach and practical, out-of-the-box insights that help both emerging and expert managers, executives and owners boost quantifiable job performance in various mission critical facets of business. Through AskRoxi.com, Roxi — “the Dear Abby of Leadership” — imparts invaluable free advice to managers and leaders at all levels, from the bullpen to the boardroom, to help them solve problems, become more effective and realize a higher measure of business and career success.

The StrategyDriven website was created to provide members of our community with insights to the actions that help create the shared vision, focus, and commitment needed to improve organizational alignment and accountability for the achievement of superior results. We look forward to answering your strategic planning and tactical business execution questions. Please email your questions to [email protected].

StrategyDriven’s Online Advisory Forum – The Advisor’s Corner

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StrategyDriven's Online Advisory Forum - The Advisor's CornerAs a business leader, you face mission-critical challenges every day. Working through these important issues in a deliberate way increases your chances of making the right decisions.

So does having an experienced, outside perspective. To further aid you in your ongoing strategic planning and tactical business execution decisions, StrategyDriven is proud to host an online advisory forum, The Advisor’s Corner. This forum provides you an opportunity to pose questions anonymously and receive real-world insights from our experienced business advisors and community professionals. Questions and answers are published in The Advisor’s Corner for the benefit of all site visitors; providing an ever growing library of experiences for you to draw from.

Submit your questions to The Advisor’s Corner by email at: [email protected]. Let us know your question’s priority and response by date so we can reply in a timely manner. All questions submitted will remain anonymous to maintain confidentiality.

Want to learn more?

Click here to visit The Advisor’s Corner and learn from the many questions and answers already posted within this unique knowledge sharing forum!

The Advisor’s Corner – Can a Manager Really Do It All?

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Question:

How can managers possibly do everything presented on the StrategyDriven website?

StrategyDriven Response:

Managers should be able to perform all of the best practices presented on the StrategyDriven website as these focus on the manager’s primary role – to manage people, resources, and their deployment. It is when managers are ‘working managers,’ doing the work of subordinates, that performance of all of our recommendations becomes untenable.

Additional Resources

The concept of the working manager is not a new one nor is its practice limited to a handful of organizations. StrategyDriven Contributors believe such practices diminishes managers’ effectiveness and diminish their organization’s overall performance. Specifics on how to recognize and avoid the pitfalls of the working manager are contained within the StrategyDriven article, Management and Leadership Warning Flag 1 – Working Managers.

The Advisor’s Corner – When Should Consultants Be Used?

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Question:

We’ve brought in a number of high priced consultants to perform a business case analysis. In hind sight, it appears we could have done the same work with internal resources. Why then did we hire these costly advisors?

StrategyDriven Response:

There are many reasons for hiring consultants. One or more of these likely applied in your situation:

  1. The consultants brought unique insights and experiences from outside your organization; enabling them to develop and present points of view that would otherwise have not been available for consideration.
  2. The organization staff did not have the capacity to perform the given task. Therefore, the consultants were hired to augment the labor pool.
  3. The existing staff had the capacity but not the knowledge and skills to perform the work. (Note that this appears to not be a factor given the question asked but is a legitimate reason for hiring consultants.)
  4. The organization is reluctant to implement the recommendations made by those internal resources not viewed as being experts in a particular area. Subsequently, the consultants are brought in because of their ‘expert status’ that leaders know will enable them to move forward with a desired course of action.

The reason for engaging consultants should always be understood prior to hiring them. Clear, quantifiable expectations should be documented within the statement of work that define the value they are to bring to the organization whether that is external knowledge and experience, labor augmentation, skills augmentation, or to drive a particular perspective. The consultants must be held to the achievement of these established goals in order to ensure they have met the return on investment promised by their employment.

Final Thought…

Using consultants should always be on a temporary basis. Some organizations fall prey to hiring consultants for temporary staff augmentation only to find that these individuals remain in position for years if not decades. Such circumstances highlight an understaffing condition that should be alleviated by the typically less expensive option of hiring additional resources rather than engaging costly consultants for extended periods.

Additional Resources

StrategyDriven Contributors further highlight the benefits of using consultants in the article, Independent Assessors.