The Proportion Contortion: Wrestling with the Relationship of Success & Failure
Every now and then, I hear an enthusiastic leader declare, “Failure is not an option!” and I cringe. He’s honed the steely-eyed stare and set his jaw, or she’s squared her shoulders and hears the inspirational music rising in her head, but they’re both headed for trouble. Failure is an option any time you set goals or purpose to make a difference because it’s integrally connected to success. If you minimize or marginalize it, you’re not amping up your team, you’re playing games or inadvertently diminishing what you'll accomplish in the end.
Success and failure are proportional and you can never pursue a success that is larger than the failure you are willing to risk. If you want a big success, you must risk a big failure. If you’re willing to risk only a small failure, you can only hope for a small success. There are no magic calipers to measure such things, but you know the difference. Some accomplishments are relatively small– like a good review or a great parking place. They make you happy if they happen, but you don’t live off that satisfaction for very long. Correspondingly, they risk only small failures—like a worse review or a longer walk—that you can shrug off with little lasting impact. Other successes are bona fide Big Deals– like a major business investment or an important relationship. If they work out, they make you more than passingly happy and they get tangled up with your identity in a good way that makes you feel more capable or more “you” than before. But the failures these successes tempt are Big Deals, too– like bankruptcy and break-ups– the kinds of failures that can put a dent in you and mess you up for a while.
The takeaway here isn’t simply to steel your nerves and up the ante in every case. (“Go big or go home” may sound burly and inspirational on bumper sticker and billboards but it’s a dangerous GoTo move for a leader.) Sometimes you can’t afford a big failure and you need to dial back your aspirations correspondingly, but you can't outmaneuver the proportional link I'm describing. You can't avoid the prospect of the kind of failure that hurts if you want to experience the kind of success that makes you proud. If you want to lead well and prepare your team to step strongly toward its goals, you need to embrace the proportionality of success and failure. Recognize that winning can only exist when losing is an option, and the trophies you hope to raise are only as substantial as the losses you could suffer.
Leaders that miss or deny this correlation set inspiring goals but end up presiding over mediocre achievements. They start out well enough, with good intentions and lofty aspirations, but then they hedge their bets. In the moment, this doesn’t feel like they’re settling for less or wimping out; it feels responsible or prudent– like they are wisely protecting themselves and their teams– but this kind of safety comes at a cost. Diminishing the size of the failure you are risking always dials back the size of the success you are chasing. So, their efforts relieve some anxiety of the race but tarnish the trophy at the end. Their team will still accomplish things, but lesser things than they hoped for at the start. This is a quiet phenomenon but a prevalent and powerful one too. It's the sneaky reason many promising leaders and initiatives wind up “successful” but unremarkable in the end.
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