American inventor Charles F. Kettering, head of research at GM from 1920-1947, once said, "you must learn how to fail intelligently. Failing is one of the greatest arts in the world. One fails forward toward success." We can't achieve consistent success without a degree of failure, which makes it vital to any organisation. When employees aren't afraid of failing or making mistakes at work, they're more productive, resilient, and innovative. 

In a recent Mindset Matters interview , I chatted with Drew Benvie , founder and CEO of Battenhall, who believes that if you haven't failed, you probably aren't experimenting enough - and he credits a lot of experimentation for his success as an entrepreneur. He shared that he has tried many things that didn't work out throughout his career, but if he hadn't, it wouldn't have been possible to identify new ideas that were worth it. In the words of Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda, "success represents the 1% of your work which results from the 99% that is called failure."

Despite the benefits of mastering failure and how it sets us up for greatness , there is still a stigma around it that encourages people to play it safe in professional settings. Pressure to perform in the workplace can cause stress and impede calculated risk-taking, especially during a pandemic when many are worried that their jobs might be vulnerable. This is why it's so important that leaders - from CEOs to line managers - cultivate a culture that makes people feel safe to fail. Here are some ways you can embrace failure at work. 

Share your failures

Leaders need to lead by example and be honest about their failures rather than only sharing their successes. If you lead a team, share stories of ways failure helped shape your career trajectory or specific projects you worked on in the past. Regularly acknowledge when you've failed at something and show that it's OK - talk to your team about where you went wrong and why, what you learned from it, and how you'll use those lessons to improve. Call it out when something you've suggested or tried isn't of value or aligning with priorities, and know when to move on from things that aren't working. As Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull has said, "if we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others."

Check out this quick Instagram coaching video that highlights ways your mindset can support you when it comes to navigating failure as part of the innovation process:

Sharing your failures makes it safe for your team members to share theirs. It creates an environment where people feel empowered to speak up, share concerns and ask questions without the fear of being judged. This culture is much more positive than the alternative, where people keep mistakes to themselves, try to cover up anything that hasn't gone to plan, and team members are defensive and reluctant to share information. This is the business culture that will stifle innovation and collaboration.

Reward mistakes

When people are scared to come forward with failures or mistakes, it takes away the opportunity for organisations to address the issue, learn from it, and stop it from occurring again. This is why it's so necessary that problems are shared with the people who would benefit from knowing about them. Amongst developers in tech companies, this is referred to as failing loudly.

An effective way to make failing loudly an integral part of your team culture is to reward mistakes. Recognise colleagues who share things that have gone wrong and openly identify and rectify errors. Celebrate failure consistently by asking all team members to come with a "failure of the week" at team meetings and talk about what they learned from it. Share these positively across the company to encourage failure sharing more widely. 

Another way to get people to think differently about failure and see the value in trying different things is to reward creative efforts regardless of whether they succeeded. For example, tech company Portworx gives a quarterly "Out of the Box" award to encourage employees to try risky or unusual approaches.

Reframe failure as experimenting

If you've been following my newsletters, you'll know that I talk a lot about the benefits of nurturing an experimental mindset. If you treat innovation as an experiment, it can provide the freedom to test new ideas without feeling that you have to make them work, or you should be able to make it work at your first attempt. When we set up experiments in the lab, we don't know what the result will be - and often, it's the same with innovation.

Every failure takes us one step closer to success - as long as you evaluate how each effort can be used as a stepping stone. As Drew talked about in our interview, we need to learn from the things that don't work and apply the things that do. We also need to figure out which experiments we should leave behind, and which ones are worth going deeper into.

To encourage this type of thinking, organisations need to promote a learning culture at work. If you need some support in boosting resilience for you and your team, you can join the "10 Days of Resilience " free coaching program and learn how to develop a growth mindset, overcome challenges and navigate uncertainty: 

Creating an environment where failure is accepted and encouraged is only half the battle - the other half involves incorporating lessons learned from those failures to create success in the future. The more we fail, the more we can do something with that information, whether tweaking, pivoting, restarting, or leaving something behind. Reflecting on failures is vital so that we're not doing the same things repeatedly.

Some things you can do to foster an experimental mindset within your team are:

1. When trying something new or experimenting with an idea, have people identify the potential risks and determine where things might go wrong or not work at all. This acknowledges up front that something might fail but that it's OK. 
2. Set check-in points throughout a project to regularly review what's working, what isn't, and whether adjustments are necessary. This makes trial and error a natural part of the process. 
3. At the end of a project, share feedback on what went well, where there were struggles, and lessons learned. This will help avoid repeat mistakes in future projects and increase trust and morale within the team. 

How do YOU fail?

What are your thoughts on failure tolerant cultures? Do you embrace failure as part of the innovation process? Share with me in the comments 😁.

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Drew Benvie is the founder and CEO of Battenhall . Drew is on a mission to make social media safer. Through his work he has shaped how we use social media since the very beginning when he wrote the first page about social media on Wikipedia in 2006. He now works with global organisations, charities and celebrities, and he has been named the most respected social media practitioner in the UK.