When is Failure Acceptable?

I am frequently struck by the paradox of executives who say they want breakthrough performance, and yet suppress the very people they are relying on to produce it. How come?

I am pretty confident we can all come up with a mental picture of a boss we know, or have known, who is constantly chanting from the breakthrough performance hymnal: we want best in class performance; we need to outperform our competitors; delighting our customers is job #1 – and so on, yet does loads of things that thwart breakthroughs.

Among other things, they punish failure, create a risk-averse culture, impose constraining rules and regulations, micro-manage with, “I don’t trust you” as the sub-text, seldom acknowledge and appreciate employees outstanding tries and results, allow gossiping and undermining, and even worse design compensation systems that by capping payout seem to be designed to maintain business-as-usual-improved-a-bit, not breakthroughs.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of the intentions such executives espouse – to be an organization that reliably produces breakthroughs and exceeds customers’ expectation all the time – just puzzled that they don’t see the extent to which they undermine themselves.

Here are some of my perspectives about how come this paradoxical condition exists:

1. We confuse failure with carelessness. Failing, after attempting to do something that has never been done before, is treated the same way as screwing up, or carelessness by not doing properly things that we know how to do. Both are considered to be equally unacceptable, and depending on the severity of the consequences, earn a ding or can be severely career limiting. To nurture a breakthrough culture the former should be rewarded and only carelessness should have disciplinary consequences.
2. We confuse risk and uncertainty and, as a consequence think of both of them as risk. We should reserve the label risk for those things that could, if they do not work out as we anticipate/want, kill or cause serious damage from which it will be hard/impossible to recover. And we should create a new and empowering relationship with uncertainty – as no more than new and unknown territory; the very territory, when explored, will likely reveal breakthroughs.
3. We relate to trust as something to be earned, so we put in checks and balances to find out if people are trustworthy – from the start signaling we don’t trust them. We then gather evidence to prove we are right. Much smarter to declare everyone trustworthy from the get go, and then hold them to account when they do things that are inconsistent with being trustworthy.

If executives just realized they are creating the conditions they complain about instead of being victims of those conditions they would make much faster progress towards the organizations they say they want.