Discover how your response to failing can strengthen your leadership and inspire your team.

My boss called me to his office after we finished our live-fire gunnery exercise. My troop excelled – we had the highest scores and a perfect maintenance record. I entered his office expecting congratulations.

“Sit down.”

Uh-oh. This isn’t what I expected.

He told me that one of my mechanics had taken an electronic component from a spare vehicle to repair another without reporting it. That was cheating. 

Instead of a commendation, my boss handed me a letter of reprimand for creating a win-at-all-costs environment, which led to the mechanic cheating. 

I didn’t intend a win-at-all-costs culture, but didn’t emphasize the importance of values as equal to results. His message sank in. 

How Do You Respond to Failing?

“I didn’t fail,” Thomas Edison reportedly said after inventing the light bulb, “I simply found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

“We cannot let the Afghan Army fail in a battle,” a four-star general told me. “How will they learn to bounce forward?” I replied. U.S. and allied forces bailed them out of every challenging situation. A few years later, the Afghan military collapsed under Taliban pressure when they realized the Americans could no longer come to the rescue – the most expensive failure in U.S. military history.

U.S. Civil War General George B. McClellan succeeded at everything in his life until he commanded the Army of the Potomac. Because everything up to that point came easy for him, he never developed the skills to bounce forward from setbacks. 

When facing the Confederate army at Antietam in September 1862, McClellan sought to protect his ego and avoid failure by wildly overestimating his opponent’s strength, moving slowly despite capturing his enemy’s battle plan, and attacking cautiously when in position to overwhelm and defeat Lee’s army. Lee lived to fight another two and a half years.

General Ulysses S. Grant, by contrast, failed repeatedly in business after being forced out of the Army for over-indulgence. He learned to bounce forward from setbacks and put measures in place to control his alcohol addiction. As a Civil War general, he focused on professional mastery, learning from his mistakes. After a poor performance on day one of the Shiloh battle, General Sherman, Grant’s subordinate, commented on the difficult day. “Yep,” Grant replied, “We’ll lick ‘em tomorrow.” And he did.

Avoiding failure generally means you’ll never succeed. You’re signing up for mediocrity, a slow failure like Sears experienced when they clung to the status quo in the face of an information-age-technology-powered Amazon. 

Mastery or Ego: Understanding People’s Primary Motivation

People’s response to failure is tied to their primary motivation. If you are motivated by ego, like McClellan, you will respond to failure with embarrassment and anger. If you are driven by mastery, like Grant, you will respond with acceptance, learning, and even humor. 

For those focused on mastery, failures lead to learning, innovation, and long-term growth. For those focused on ego, failures lead to finger-pointing, excuses, and defensiveness.

Understanding people’s primary motivation—mastery or ego—is essential so that you hire people who respond to mistakes and failures with resilience instead of blame.

Failing is a normal part of striving for new heights. Encourage it. You only become a failure when you start blaming others.

Do you want to improve how your employees transform setbacks into wins? Schedule a call, and I’ll guide you through the action steps you can immediately implement.