building my Leadership Philosophy (part 2)

In my previous post, I covered the first principle of my leadership philosophy, Constantly Strive for Excellence. My second principle is directly related to the first: Fail Better.

If you've read Freakonomics by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt, you may be aware of their excellent podcast, Freakonomics Radio. Definitely check it out, they put out great stuff regarding everyday life. One of their best podcasts of is about failure, titled "Failure is Your Friend." They discuss how failure is actually an extremely beneficial outcome, as it prompts more introspection, constructive criticism, and tough rational examination then success. It's for these reasons that Fail Better is my second principle. I expect my subordinates (and myself) to fail regularly. Because if we regularly fail, we push our comfort zones and attempt new courses of action or problem solving methods. Mark Zuckerberg famously gave the initial employees of Facebook guidance to "fail fast", meaning they should be constantly pushing the envelope, experimenting with new techniques, and equally as important, quickly discarding efforts that failed to succeed. While the Army is nowhere near the organizational flexibility of a Silicon Valley start-up, there is still tremendous value in adopting a similar mindset in regards to failure. Fail Better means that failure is an welcome outcome, with one important caveat: You must learn and improve from the failure. An solution applied to a complex problem may not solve the problem, but that failure can be just as useful, provided that the lessons learned are captured. What cannot be tolerated is hiding the failure or shrugging it off. Failures must be exposed to the cold light of day, not cast into the shadows. It takes humility and a bit of pride swallowing to correctly do this, which is unnatural and uncommon for most military members. Tough shit, get over it. The only true failure is not learning from your failures.

Important sidenote: It's assumed that before one can Fail Better, they are already Constantly Striving for Excellence. This isn't a chicken or the egg kind of question. You've got to be invested in the success of your organization and put forth the kind of effort needed to help it achieve greatness. Otherwise your failures will not be nested and linked with the good of the organization. Viewing failure as a good thing is not easy for most members of the military. Our organizations are typically run with near zero-defect mentalities, where most leaders are more concerned with fitting inside the prescribed mold. To make failure acceptable, the original efforts must be aimed at making the organization better. This makes Fail Better as perhaps my most unorthodox principle, with considerable challenges to implement. No boss likes being told "sir, they operation was a failure, and will set back our timeline by a month, but my guys really learned a lot." No, we want our victory, and we want it yesterday. But being a good leader isn't solely about delivering results. You've also got to grow your people, to ensure that they are developing their skills and competencies, so that next time, they'll do better.