Introduction
Leadership failure in an organization occurs when a firm’s management encounters difficulties when giving instructions and coordinating the functions of employees. Failure of leadership leads to delay or total failure of accomplishing goals, demoralization of employees, and poor work quality. Some of the causes of failure of organizational leadership include individualism and lack of effective and consistent communication, inflexibility, lack of countability, and negative attitudes. When a leader lacks flexibility, he tends to use the same old methods of doing things, limiting growth and long-term success. Since a leader influences those around him, any negative attitude towards work from the leader has the effect of being passed on to the group members. However, as Obama said, failure presents an opportunity to learn and grow. When identified and corrected, leadership failure boosts the firm’s growth, strengthens the firm’s ability to face challenges, and builds stronger than before relationships. A leader or an organization must learn from leadership failure and start building from the failure. However, learning from failure may or not always occur. This paper will examine the role of leadership failure in firms, lessons that can be learned from the failure, and the factors affecting learning from failure in leadership.
The Role of Leadership Failure in Business Today
Though leadership failure hurts a business’s operations and the leader’s reputation, it has a positive effect on the leader. Failure gives the leader an opportunity to reflect with trusted individuals. The leader may choose to reflect with a colleague or mentor he trusts. The mentor or colleague might give the leader an honest response, encouragement, and advice on what to do to avoid a re-occurrence of the failure. Reflecting also allows the leader to learn from mentors what steps to take to build on past failures.
A failure in leadership makes the leader start perceiving success and failure as two sides of a coin. Failure and success go hand in hand. Many leaders tend to attribute the success of a project to themselves, but when a failure arises, they blame external factors such as environmental conditions, market conditions, or the other team members. Though external factors indeed influence success or failure, they are mainly a result of the leader’s actions, brilliance, or lack thereof. Accepting and examining internal and external factors enable the leader to learn more from the failure and make the necessary corrections.
When handled correctly, leadership failure allows the leader to turn individual failures into crucial changes and improvements. Most firms have implemented activities used to learn from failure, normally called after-action reviews or post-mortem. These processes help the leader to learn from their failure. When the learning is implemented, it leads to significant changes and improvements that can make the condition even better than before the failure. The learning leads to the creation of a list of actions that would prevent the failure from occurring again in the future. However, if the learning from action reviews is not implemented, the review becomes unhelpful to the leader and the organization (Good, 2020).
Failure and learning from it are vital in a leader’s future development. Learning from failure teaches leaders a lesson and the experience needed to tackle a similar problem in the future (Zhou et al., 2020). This way the likelihood of subsequent failures is minimized because past failures have enhanced the problem-solving ability of the leader. Learning from a mistake that caused a failure enhances the quality of future decision-making and promotes creativity and innovation in work. Though many believe acknowledging a failure may be detrimental to a leader’s reputation (Dahlin et al., 2018), making good of a failure may help leverage it and enhance employee development.
Learning from failures helps a leader identify the difference between the external requirements of the organization and his own capability (Chen et al., 2017). This paves the way for self-development and intrinsic motivation, which helps the individual motivate himself and focus on self-improvement. This involves the leader setting long term personal goals and voluntary participation in personal development-oriented activities. In self-development, the leader actively seeks feedback from his colleagues and higher management and utilizes the feedback to make improvements. The leader also actively tracks his personal development progress, which reduces the firm’s training and employee development costs.
Failure helps a leader to appreciate his responsibilities as a leader. When a leader fails, he is compelled to think of his mandate in the organization and how his duty impacts his colleagues and the organization. This way, the leader is motivated to have the desire to become more effective and hence find means of improving his leadership and organization skills. The leader then researches and studies how successful leaders have conquered failure(Llopis,2019). The leader becomes more accountable and responsible by ensuring his actions do not affect the team members and the firm.
Lessons that can be Learnt from Organizational Leadership Failure
Leadership failure is a powerful source of knowledge and understanding. It provides the leader with tips on survival, self-development and intrinsic improvement. Glenn Llopis (2019) affirms that failure drove the most rewarding opportunities he got and achieved in his career to become a successful entrepreneur. A leader’s decisions, the people he recruits into his team, and the working relationships he establishes are influenced by learning from a past failure. For example, a failure gives a leader a new understanding of his team members’ expectations of him as the leader. This motivates the leader to work harder to meet the expectations of his team and the organization.
Failure is one of a successful career’s greatest enablers. Failure enables leaders to take corrective measures and try new methods and techniques. If a leader never fails, they will never take measures to course-correct or try new methods of taking previously unseen opportunities. A reaction to failure is what defines the character of a leader. A failure teaches a leader to face it head-on and learn from it. A well-handled failure teaches the leader to take time and reflect on the situation instead of learning away or trying to cover a failure. Confronting the failure face-to-face enables the leader to make evaluations, identify lessons learned from the failure, and take advantage of the beneficial opportunities that can be derived from the failure(John, 2018).
Failure in leadership helps the leader to learn that some teammates are trustworthy and reliable while others are not. A failure teaches the leader about the individuals in the organization who has their back, and he can depend upon them. Leadership failure that results from failed or poor relationships at work helps the leader learn and find ways of making the system and hierarchy more efficient. It also helps the leader to effectively coordinate the interdependent decisions made by the individual members of the team. A previous failure helps the leader learn new ways of re-organizing his team, making the group more united and more effective(Weekly, 2021).
Failure teaches a leader to be courageous when entering new ventures. In the face of failure, the leader learns to trust his feelings and conscience, making him make better and more informed decisions. This way, the leader can face new and more challenging situations. Reflecting on a failure might make the leader realize he was close to succeeding. It helps reduce the severity of a failure. When a leader learns that success was near amid failure, he begins to navigate and take advantage of opportunities with greater know-how and focus. Though it can tempt people to quit with the loss and pain it brings, failure gives the leader hope if he allows himself to learn from it (Llopis,2019).
Failure helps the leader learn that second chances are available and that one can always pick themselves up. Only when he fails does the leader learn that failure is not fatal nor permanent. Failure serves as a wake-up call to rectify and take the upcoming opportunity. When leaders learn that there is always a second chance after failure, he sees opportunities more broadly. This widens his possible opportunities and ventures (Inam, 2018). Learning how to handle an upcoming opportunity helps the leader devise ways of overcoming adversity.
Through failure, a leader learns to anticipate failure in the future. Though every leader ventures into a project or an opportunity with the aim of succeed, achieving long-term success relies on the leader’s ability to anticipate failure and to handle it when it occurs (Dahlin et al., 2018). When venturing into a new project, past failure helps the leader to anticipate failure and therefore seek the advice of his teammates, another leader, or mentors. He consults other leaders who have handled similar tasks, and from them, he learns what to expect in the task. Expecting failure also compels the leader to recognize that he cannot successfully handle the upcoming task alone hence he involves his team members in the decision-making.
In the face of a leadership failure, the leader learns how to turn a mistake into an asset that promotes his future success. He learns that no one is perfect and failure is inevitable (Good, 2020). Making perfection a standard leads to creating an unfavorable environment which leads to the fear of failure. Fearing to fail hinders the leader’s and his team’s ability to be creative and find innovative solutions to problems. Taking risks helps to give quality output by testing for any failure before selling the product to clients or top management for assessment. For example, when designing a product, testing it, and realizing that it does not function properly helps the leader to go back to the drawing board, identify the cause of the failure, and take corrective measures.
Factors that Hinder Learning from Leadership Failure
Though failures are meant to strengthen the leader and help him make corrections to prevent subsequent failures, not all leaders come out of adversity stronger. A leader’s reaction to failure defines his character. One of the causes for not learning from failures is taking the challenging situation personally and failing to take responsibility for the failures (Forgeard, 2022). Leaders who avoid taking responsibility for failures normally do this to prevent damaging their reputation and minimize negative talk from other employees. When this happens, the morale and harmony of the team are severely affected as the focus of the group shifts from solving the failure-causing problems to solving feelings and conflicts between them. Blame games between team members normally characterize such situations.
Failure to communicate with the team members is another factor that makes recovering from failure difficult. Leaders who find it difficult to communicate their failure normally do this because they want to keep sensitive information confidential (Forgeard, 2022). The consequences of poor communication are damaging both to the group and the firm. In the team, a lack of consistent communication leads to a feeling of dissatisfaction among the members of the group. This has the effect of making them rebel against the leader. Lack of trust from the group members is the ultimate fall of a leader. Consequently, subsequent failures follow, leading to financial losses to the organization, and putting the leader’s position at risk.
References
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