Moving from Failure to Success

In this episode of the Reaching Your Peak Podcast, I, Jeff from Apex Leadership Development, share insights on the importance of learning from failure. Recorded during an early morning airport run, I reflect on a recent experience where technology failures occurred within an organization. I emphasize the need to avoid the blame game, highlighting that failures often stem from flawed processes rather than individual shortcomings.

I discuss the significance of taking ownership as a leader, acknowledging our roles in failures, and focusing on improving processes to prevent future issues. Drawing from the wisdom of mentors like Marcus Limonis and Andy Stanley, I stress that our systems are designed to yield specific results, and if those results are unsatisfactory, we must re-evaluate our processes.

Additionally, I address the importance of setting achievable goals. Using an illustrative example, I explain how unrealistic expectations can lead to failure, underscoring the need for practical and attainable objectives. By understanding our failures and making actionable changes, we can transform today's setbacks into tomorrow's successes.

I hope these insights provide value to you and your organization as you strive to reach your peak performance. If you find this episode helpful, please share your thoughts in the comments. Have a great day!

Transcript

So hey, Jeff here with Apex Leadership Development and Reaching Your Peak Podcast. So I wanted to follow up. I'm on an early morning airport run, by the way. It's like, I'm recording this at 6.38 a.m., just left the airport, dropping somebody off, headed home. So anyway, just wanted to throw some thoughts out here. A couple weeks ago, dropped some thoughts about failing. Talked about failing forward. I was doing a little bit of diving into that a little bit, just really looking at failure and learning from failure. Here's how we learn from failure. Number one, never play the blame game when something fails. It's really easy to try to blame a person. But, never play the blame game. So, a couple weeks ago, I went to visit an organization, was doing something with that organization, and there were some failures, technology failures, a couple things that just didn't work the way they were supposed to work. So, the person that was in charge of that isn't the person that would normally be in charge of that. It's really easy to point the finger at the person that's running the thing, but understanding that there was a process that something got missed in the process. There should have been a step A, a step B, a step C, a step D. There wasn't an A, B, C, D in the process. What failed wasn't the person, what failed was the process. We could play the blame game and blame that person and say that that person didn't do their job right, they didn't understand what they were supposed to do, when in reality we just never created a process that was going to work right. I remember Marcus Limonis always on the profit talking about people, process, and product. The right people were doing the right job. They had an understanding of what to do. It wasn't an issue like that. It was just that we didn't have a process in place that was going to make that function properly. Don't play the blame game. Don't blame people. Don't blame somebody else. If you were at fault, just go ahead and say, hey, I was the person that needed to do this. When you're a leader, the leaders that I've noticed that are most successful that make themselves stand out from other people are those leaders that take ownership for that and say, hey, that process was something that I should have been in charge of and I want to own that mistake and I'm going to make sure that this doesn't happen again. So leaders own their own failures. They don't blame other people for it. So that's one of the biggest takeaways I think that we can have from learning to fail forward. I didn't realize that John Maxwell has a book by that title. John's one of my mentors. I'm part of the Maxwell leadership certified team as well. So anyway, if we're failing forward, we're not blaming others. We're actually going to take and own that as a leader ourself and say, hey, this is my part of it. And like I said, typically it's a process thing, and we're going to look for that process that we can make it better. The second thing I think that we can really take away from our learning to turn And so basically what the idea is, is let's turn our failures into future successes. Today's failures equal future successes, right? So the first part of that is don't blame people for it. The second part of that is really gain an understanding for why it didn't work to begin with. So dive deep into it, like in that situation that I mentioned, we identified a process that wasn't working properly. So now we can fix that process so that in the future we don't have to worry about the same thing happening again. So if you can understand, if you can figure out what went wrong and see where the breakdown was. Was it a communication issue? Was it a process issue? Another one of my mentors, Andy Stanley, talks about how our systems are uniquely designed to give us the exact results that we're getting. So if we're not getting the results that we want, what do we need to do? We need to re-examine that process. So don't blame others. Own the part ourselves. Understand why it failed. And then one of the other things that I really think you need to look at is, was this actually something achievable? Yep, I know. I paused there intentionally because I wanted some of you that have been listening to a lot of my videos and a lot of the things I've been talking about. I've been talking about setting goals that scare you, setting goals that are bigger than you. And so that's, I'm not talking about that, you know, like make a million dollars in a year goal. What I'm talking about is actual functional goals, functional things, processes that we're supposed to do, daily activities in our job duty, in our corporate structure, things that we're leading. We have things that we need to get done on a consistent basis. When there's a breakdown, was this something that was actually achievable? When we're breaking down, was it achievable? Borrowing from Jim Collins, did we have the right people and the right bus headed in the right direction? Was it achievable with the team that I had? Was it achievable with the goal set that we had? Was the actual outcome that we were looking for achievable? a friend wanted to do this event and they had this roadmap as to how they could make it was multiple thousands of dollars over the course of a short weekend right and it was a lot of money that they were looking to make over the course of this weekend but when you actually sat down and yes the numbers worked if you sold x widgets during x time you were going to make X dollars, okay? Here's the problem. There wasn't enough time to make and sell all of the widgets within the time frame that was allotted for it. So, from a theoretic principle, had you sold 100 widgets, you would have made $1,000 each and made $100,000. The problem was the widgets had to be made on spot, and they had to be sold on spot, and there wasn't enough time to make that many widgets. Obviously it wasn't widgets, but all of the names in the story have been changed to protect the innocent. But you're seeing what I'm saying there. It was not an achievable goal under the process that they were doing. So could the process have been changed? There might have been certain things that could have been done. The real thought there is, is it something that you can actually achieve? Was there a way that that goal was achievable? If not, then you have to figure out what needs to change in my process, what needs to change in my system. This is what I'm saying about turning today's failures into future successes. If we can understand and gain a knowledge of ways that we can change our organization, change our leadership, change our processes. If we can make actionable changes within our organization because of the failures that we had today, they are going to lead to our successes tomorrow. So I hope this helps you. I hope it helps change your organization. Jeff with Apex Leadership Development, Reaching Your Peak Podcast. Listen, I just want to see everybody make it to the peak of their performance where they can get to what you can achieve in your life and with your goals and in your organization and your personal life. So I hope this is adding some value to you. If it is, just leave it in the comments. Let me know. I'd love to hear from you. And I hope you all have a great day. I'm going to go home and get a little bit of rest since I just ended my workday at 6.46 in the morning. Have a great day, everybody.