Learn From Failure

Sikin said failure is never the goal; it is simply the means to get to a goal. Organizations should view certain failures as strategic; rather than focusing on “the impossible ideal of learning by avoidance, it is more fruitful for both theory and practice to ask how organizations might more effectively pursue learning by experimentation.” Companies such as Google, Facebook or even Eli Lilly & Co. exemplify this — all have been known to turn what may have been a failure in one area into a success in another.

Perception Matters
The depth to which failures are accepted as a development and innovation driver also will vary by industry. According to Prudential Financial’s Metzger, who’s heavily involved in the company’s leadership development efforts, failure cannot operate to the same degree across different organizations. Learning leaders need to recognize how and if failure as a learning tool will align with an organization’s business strategy and industry. The ways in which certain failures are accepted in this vein likely will be different for every company.

“There are businesses like Facebook that can afford to move fast and break things and just recover quickly,” Metzger said. “So, if that’s OK for your industry, that’s a way to go.”

That is not always the case for a firm like Prudential, which prior to the financial crisis and ensuing recession sought to develop a new leadership competency around innovation. The genesis of the competency stemmed from the company’s desire to promote growth and alter the perception that it had grown too stodgy and boring, dull and dependable.

Prudential wanted to develop a competency in its leaders so they would take more risks to help grow the business over the long term. “There was a feeling that we really needed to get out there and think more broadly and make some mistakes and slip and fall and learn from that,” Metzger said.