Failure in Your Team: What You Do Next Defines You

The moment someone fails on your team is the moment your leadership gets tested. When a trusted employee lies, a partner breaks trust, or a high performer collapses under pressure, the question isn’t only what they did. The bigger question is how we respond without letting anger, embarrassment, fear, or betrayal drive the next decision. I share why leading from a wounded ego almost always produces an overreaction, and how the simple principle “don’t make permanent decisions from temporary emotion” can protect your people and your business. 

We walk through the real psychology of failure at work, including shame, hiding, defensiveness, minimizing, withdrawal, and blame shifting, and why misreading shame as rebellion can turn correction into damage. Then we ground the conversation in Scripture with practical leadership insights: Jesus restoring Peter after public denial, Nathan confronting David with direct private honesty, and Paul’s long view on John Mark’s usefulness after a setback. These stories shape a biblical approach to discipline vs punishment, and mercy vs avoiding hard conversations. 

From there, I give a clear way to diagnose what kind of failure you’re dealing with so your response fits the cause: skill failure, judgment failure, character failure, or pattern failure. We also tackle a common struggle for Christian business owners and faith-based leaders, the difference between grace and enablement. Grace can restore a person’s dignity and future, while consequences protect the organization’s integrity, finances, and culture. You’ll leave with a restoration framework built on acknowledgement, defined consequences, time-based trust rebuilding, and the right level of transparency when failure is public. 

If this helps you lead with clarity, courage, and compassion, subscribe, share the episode with a leader you know, and leave a review so more people can find biblical business principles that actually work.

Transcript

Welcome And What We Do

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to the Christian Business Concepts with your host, Harold Milby. Christian Business Concepts is dedicated to guiding companies and business owners in becoming effective, efficient, and successful through God's Word and godly principles. Now here's your host, Harold Milby.

Leading Someone After They Fail

Mastering Your First Reaction

Biblical Models Of Correction

Four Failure Types To Diagnose

Grace Versus Enablement At Work

A Framework For Wise Restoration

Checklist, Prayer, And Share Request

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Thanks, Kelly, and welcome to all of you who have decided to download and listen to this week's Christian Business Concepts Podcast. I'm so glad that you've decided to join us, whether this is your first time or whether you're a regular listener. If you're wanting to learn how to find true godly success by applying biblical business principles to business concepts, then you found the right podcast. I'm your host, Harold Milby, and each week we try to encourage you, enlighten you, and empower you to find and walk in godly success. Most of you know that I pastored two churches before embarking on a long business career, spending years as a vice president of sales and operations. And I not only host the CBC podcast, but I'm a certified business coach, trainer, and speaker. You can check out my business website if you want to. It's www.heroldmilby trainer.com. And we also have some free uh resources on our Christian Business Concepts uh website. So you can go to uh Christian Business Concepts.org, O-R-G, not dot com. Uh well, that's enough for the commercials. Uh uh this week I'd like to give a big shout out to Powell, Ohio, here in the United States, for having so many downloads in the last few weeks. We appreciate all of you and Powell for being a part of the CBC community, and thanks to all of you for being a part of the CBC family. Now, in one of our podcasts recently, we discussed what to do when a leader or owner fails or falls in a really big way. So today I want to discuss how you lead someone. If you're a leader or a business owner, how do you lead someone after they fail? Because when we do that, what happens is it says a lot more about our leadership. There, I don't think there's anything that can say anything greater than how we lead someone after they they fail. Because every leader, every owner, eventually, you're going to face a moment when a trusted employee lies, or maybe a team member makes a very expensive mistake, a partner breaks trust, or a leader under you falls morally, or maybe a key performer just melts down under pressure. So then what? You know, do you do do you do you remove them immediately? Do you restore them immediately? Do you punish them? Uh do you protect them? Or do you distance yourself? I mean, you know, leading others through failure requires some type of of principles that you adhere to. And in my mind, as you're dealing with, I think you you've you've got certain things that you need. You need discernment, you need emotional intelligence, that's important, then you need biblical wisdom, and you need courage, and then you need cultural awareness, you know, what is your culture like? And in this episode, we're we're gonna unpack the the psychology of failure and others, the difference between discipline and punishment, uh, biblical case studies, some corporate parallels, and then public versus private restoration, and how to rebuild trust wisely. You know, John Maxwell, who has been my mentor for years, said the difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure. So we first have to understand failures in others, right? So the leader's first emotional reaction is important. So when when somebody under you fails, you may feel angry, you know. How could they do that? You know, you may feel anger, or you may feel embarrassment. Hey, this this reflects on me. So they may feel embarrassment, or maybe it it may be fear. What's this gonna cost this? What's this gonna cost me? What's it gonna cost the company? Or you may feel betrayed, you know. I trusted them. You know, but here's the danger. If you lead from a wounded ego, then you're going to overreact 99.9% of the time. Failure in others often kind of feels like a mirror. Uh, it exposes your culture uh within your organization, it exposes your systems, it exposes your oversight, and it also exposes leadership blind spots. So here's a principle that I think is important. Don't make permanent decisions from temporary emotion. That's key, that's important. You know, so there's this psychology of failure in others. You know, when somebody fails, they often experience shame, which causes hiding. Um they they may experience defensiveness, um, you know, where they try to justify what happened, or they may uh try to minimize. You know, I used to have a son, I still have a son, but I mean, my son used to would say things like, Well, I know what I did was bad. Well, at least it wasn't as bad as so-and-so. He did this. And so he was always trying to minimize what he was doing. Uh they may they may experience withdrawal, or they may experience uh what I would consider to be blame shifting, where they want to shift the blame on other people. So if you misinterpret shame as rebellion, you you may punish that person instead of restore that person. You know, failure is like a house fire. You know, some fires start from negligence, some from faulty wiring, some from lightning. The response depends on the cause. And you have to look at that in the same way when you're trying to deal with somebody who has failed or has fallen in a big way. You know, when you look at Jesus and Peter, you know, Peter denied Christ and he denied him publicly in a huge way. Now, notice that Jesus didn't shame him, he also didn't replace him immediately, and he did not publicly humiliate him. And he restored him with questions. The next time he saw Jesus, of course, this was after his death and resurrection, you'll notice that Jesus confronted the issue by asking him three times, Peter, do you love me? And so correction without calling, it really crushes, you know. But then if you have calling without correction, it corrupts. So healthy leadership holds both of those. You know, if you look at Nathan, he confronted David, he did it directly. He didn't gossip, he didn't publicly expose him first, he didn't ignore it, he confronted it privately. So when you confront privately, you do that whenever it's possible. You correct publicly only when it's necessary. You know, Mark in the Gospels, Mark, John Mark, is who I'm talking about, he abandoned Paul in the middle of a missionary journey. So Paul refused to take him with him again in the future. But later you find out that Paul writes about Mark and he says, Bring Mark. He's useful to me. So failure did not permanently define who Mark was. See, sometimes restoration is not immediate, but growth can happen a little bit later. So that can take place. It doesn't always happen immediately at the same time. So that's important to recognize and understand as well. So you need to understand, we talked about having discernment. You need to be able to discern because not all failures are equal. And you need to distinguish between some of these here, okay? Because sometimes there's skill failure. So the employees simply didn't know how to do the task or they lacked the proper tools or were placed in a role that it just really exceeded their current abilities, and and uh this is a failure based upon their capacity, not really their intention. So it was really kind of a competence gap. So you need to recognize that you can't punish someone into competence. If you discipline a skill failure, you'll only create fear and anxiety. So what you want to do is provide targeted training or maybe some mentorship. You want to ensure that they have the resources that they need to be very successful and to succeed. See, sometimes it may also require reassigning them into another place that best fits them within your organization that matches their current skill set. The other could be a judgment failure. I call this the wisdom gap. So, in other words, the employee had the skills, but in a specific moment they made a poor choice. They didn't read the situation right, or maybe they reacted emotionally, or um uh or or maybe they failed to think through uh the consequences of their action. Maybe they sent a harsh email to a client or they rushed a project and they missed some key details. You know, so you want to help them see the blind spots that led to that poor position. You know, and this is where you as a leader you transition from a boss to a coach. So ask some probing questions rather than just giving answers. You know, say things like, hey, walk me through your thought process here. What could we do differently next time? And you know, maybe implement some temporary accountability checkpoints to help them rebuild their decision-making uh skills before you give them full autonomy again, if I can say that. Another is character failure. And I call that the integrity gap. So this is the most severe type of failure because it involves a conscious choice to violate the organization's core values or ethics or maybe some moral standards like lying, stealing, maybe deep deception or harassment. Uh and you've got to protect the organization and your culture above that individual. You know, uh it's like a bridge. You know, uh it's like a rotten foundation. If you tolerate character failure, it you're gonna validate it to the rest of the team. I'm gonna give you an example. So we had a person high up within our organization that was caught stealing, uh caught red-handed with not only evidence but also witnesses. And he had been doing this for several years. And so the CEO came to me and said, I'm thinking about moving him to this other facility and still utilizing him because he's got a good skill set. And I told him, I said, you can't do it. You can't do it because it sends the wrong message to the rest of the organization. So basically, what it says is that it's okay to steal. You may lose your position and be put in another position if you get caught, but that's the worst that's going to happen. It's a bad message, and it and it says that our culture of ethics, integrity, our culture of our very much strong values that we have within our organization doesn't mean anything. And so he did wind up terminating that employee. So that's important, especially when it's character failure. Now, sometimes it's a pattern failure, which I call the discipline gap. You know, a single event is a mistake, but a repeated mistake, that's a pattern. If an employee continually, continually makes the same skill or judgment error, despite training, despite coaching, it becomes a pattern of failure. You know, if they're constantly late, if they they are missing deadlines all the time. So you've got to recognize that the issue is no longer about the original mistake, it's now about their inability or unwillingness to change. So you've got to set some very rigid, some very measurable boundaries with a clear timeline. And you've got to put them on a performance improvement plan, a PIP. They need to know exactly what success looks like and what the consequences of failing to change is gonna be. And that the grace period for this specific issue has expired. So you've got to do that. Uh now, you've got to understand the difference between grace and enablement. See, many faith-based leaders struggle here because they confuse, and I talk to people like this a lot. They're good people, they're good business owners, but they struggle. And they confuse forgiveness with removing consequences. So they're afraid that holding someone accountable is unloving and it doesn't show any grace. However, really, true biblical grace is about redeeming the individual's heart and standing, not shielding them from the natural professional fallout of what their actions were. When a leader removes the consequences, they're really not showing grace. What they're doing is disenabling them and enabling that dysfunction. You know, grace restores that person. Now, consequences protect the organization. So grace looks like sitting down with the individual, affirming their value, offering forgiveness, helping them find a path forward, even if that path is outside the company. Consequences look like a demotion. They have a loss of privileges or even termination. And these are necessary at times to protect the health, maybe, or the finances, or the integrity of your business. And you can fully forgive someone while still recognizing that they can no longer hold the company checkbook. I mean, we've got to have to be honest with that. You know, the danger of what you tolerate is what you validate, is important to understand. You know, what you tolerate, you validate. When you protect an individual from the consequences of their failure, you're sending a message to the rest of your people, which is what I just shared that story with you about. You, you, you know, high performers, they become deeply motivated when they see leaders lower the bar to accommodate, or I should say demotivated, I think I said motivated, but they become deeply demotivated when they see that you lower the bar to accommodate bad behavior. If a leader just kind of shuffles a problem around, you know, like uh this guy was going to do and put him in a different location, then the rest of the team feels like that's an injustice. And you begin to erode your culture and your trust. You know, because your culture is defined not by the values written on your wall, but by the worst behavior you're willing to tolerate. And if you let a toxic but high-producing salesperson slide, for example, your team learns that performance matters more than integrity. Uh, you know, it's kind of like if you think about a basketball game. If the referee decides to show grace by never blowing the whistle on fouls, the players will quickly realize that there's no rules. And then the game just develops into this chaos. You know, players get hurt, fans get up and leave. You know, the referee's boundaries, those whistles that he blows, they don't exist to punish the players, they exist to protect the integrity of the game. And in the same way, a leader's boundaries protect the mission of the organization. It ensures a safe and fair environment for the entire team. So boundaries protect the mission. So what about the process of restoration? Well, if restoration is appropriate, here's the framework. First of all, there's got to be clear acknowledgement. You have to have clear acknowledgement. They've got to fully own it. It can't be a partial confession. You know, Proverbs 28, 13 says, Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy. Psalms 32 and 5 says, Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilty of my sin, the guilt of my sin. So that's the first thing. Clear acknowledgement. Next, you've got to define what the consequences are. So clarity removes resentment, but ambiguity breeds suspicion. Right? Hebrews 12 11 says, No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. So this highlights that clear, defined purpose and result of discipline. Galatians 6 and 7 says, Do not be deceived, God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. So that speaks to the natural, defined consequences of our actions. So you have to define those consequences. Next, you've got to have a time-based period of what of when that trust is going to be rebuilt. See, trust rebuilds through consistency, transparency, and measurable change. That's how you rebuild trust. Trust is rebuilt in drops, but trust is also lost in buckets. So it takes longer to rebuild that trust. You know, Matthew 3 and 8 says, produce fruit in keeping with repentance. See, that demonstr in demonstrates that true change requires this observable, this measurable action over time. You know, Luke 16, 10 says, whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much. And whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. So that illustrates this step-by-step incremental nature of rebuilding trust. Proverbs 25, 19 says, like a fractured tooth or a dislocated foot is reliance on the unfaithful in times of trouble. This is just a vivid, very vivid reminder of why trust is lost in buckets and it may be carefully rebuilt before bearing any weight upon that trust again. So next, there's visibility when that's needed. You know, John 21, 15 through 17, Jesus asked Peter three times, Do you love me? And he did that in the presence of the other disciples. So he, you know, Peter denied Christ three times in public. And publicly Jesus restores him, reinstates him with a command to feed his sheep. 1 Timothy 5 20 says, But those elders who are sinning, you are to reprove them before everyone, so that others may take warning. But see, that establishes this biblical precedent that public leadership failures often require public addressing if failure was public. So restoration may need to be public. It may need to be a public announcement. You know, Peter was restored publicly because the denial was public. So you need to do that. You know, you you can see some examples here, like leaders who who mishandle a public crisis. They kind of respond with this you know, public ownership, clear communication, structural correction, cultural recommitment. They recover. They recover. When they handle things in this way, things are recovered. Leaders who blame, who deflect, who hide, they often make the damage a lot worse. You know, when you're in a corporate culture, your trust recovery hinges on transparency. You've got to be completely transparent. Silence creates suspicion, but transparency builds credibility. So you've got to protect your culture during this restoration time. So when somebody fails, your entire team is watching. They're asking, hey, are standards real? Is integrity going to be enforced? Is grace selective? Person to person? Is leadership fair? You know, if you restore too quickly, you damage trust. If you punish too harshly, you're going to damage morale. So there's this balance. There's this balance. Theodore Roosevelt said, it is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. So failures sometimes happen on that quest of being successful. You know, it's like performing surgery. You know, if you get too aggressive, you can cause damage to the person you have a surgery with. If you're too passive, you may be able to, you may invite infection. So wisdom requires balance. It requires having that balance. It's so critically important. So not everybody gets restored. Some failures disqualify them from certain roles or even being employed by the organization. Forgiveness isn't always equal, re does not always equal reinstatement. David was forgiven, but he did not get to build the temple because he had shed innocent blood. Samson was used again, but never regained his former position. You know, leadership maturity means you can love somebody and still remove them from leadership. You know, restoration is relational. Reinstatement is positional. And those two things are very, very different. So you need a practical checklist, right? So when somebody fails, you have to ask, what type of failure is this? Was it public, was it private? Is there repentance? Is there a pattern? What protects the culture? What honors grace? What serves the long-term mission of the organization? So if someone under your leadership has failed, you've got to lead with clarity, courage, and compassion. You're not just managing behavior, you're shaping culture. The goal is not punishment. The goal is redemption without compromising the integrity of the company. You know, great leaders are not those who avoid messy situations. They are those who walk through them very wisely. Because how you handle somebody else's failure is going to define the moral tone of your own organization. You know, Lord, we come and we thank you right now for helping us to grow and learn from your word as business leaders. Lord, we don't take it lightly. Your word speaks to us. Lord, we thank you for helping us to learn how to help others through their failures when they fall. Lord, let us utilize the principles that we've learned here today to become better leaders and to help others in our companies and organizations, Lord. Lord, we thank you for giving us this wisdom today. Lord, we thank you that, Lord, this wisdom touches our mind and our heart. Lord, we thank you and we praise you for it in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, I want to thank you again for downloading and listening to today's podcast. Uh uh, I'd like to ask you kindly, if you would, just to help us to grow the CBC podcast family by sharing this podcast with four or five other people. And and and really, you could really help us by posting a link of this podcast uh on your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. So just you know, go in there and create a create create a uh uh not a page, but uh just create a comment uh in in your you know in your LinkedIn or your Facebook, just make a post. And in that post, if you would, just put our link to our podcast, and we'd greatly appreciate that. Well, it looks like we're out of time this week again, so until next time, remember, Jesus is Lord and He wants you blessed.

SPEAKER_01 26:50

Thank you for tuning into this week's Christian Business Concepts Podcast. Go to Christian Business Concepts.com for more information and resources. Be sure to check out other podcasts that will help you take your business and your personal life to a whole new level of success.