Learning how to fail helps us to be brave

how you can find the inner courage to lead a great team?

Believe it or not, business leaders could learn a lot from skydivers. Before aspiring skydivers are allowed to hit the skies, they spend numerous training sessions learning how to hit the ground safely by simply jumping off ladders. The lesson for leaders? If you’re going to be brave, then it’s best to prepare yourself for bumpy landings. In other words, you need to learn how to be resilient.

Unsurprisingly, things are done differently in business than in skydiving. Leaders and leadership coaches are usually aware of the need for resilience training, but these skills are usually taught only after a failure or crisis has already happened. It’s comparable to teaching newbie skydivers the right way to hit the ground after they’ve already landed, or worse, when they’re already in free-fall.

But there is a better way. Research has shown that when it comes to teaching leaders resilience skills, timing is everything. Specifically, teaching them early on as part of a wider training program is more likely to result in them demonstrating courageous behaviors. 

Why? Quite simply, they are confident in their ability to get back up again if their daring behavior doesn’t pay off. So companies that fail to instill these resilience skills in their workforce are effectively deterring their leaders, both present and future, from bravery.

Some organizations may worry that teaching leaders how to fail from the get-go promotes a culture of low expectations. In fact, the opposite is true. For instance, in the author’s own company she makes it a priority to teach failing and resilience skills as part of the onboarding process for new recruits. It’s the company’s way of telling new joiners that bravery is expected, thus failure is also expected once in a while.

Interestingly, this emphasis on resilience is nothing new. You may well have seen company slogans urging you to “fall forward” and “fail fast!” But without a resilience skills program to back them up, implemented at an early stage in a leader’s development, these slogans can do more harm than good. Why? Because leaders who fail without the resilience skills to cope quickly find themselves dealing with a double dose of shame – the shame of the initial failure quickly followed by the shame of struggling to pick themselves up again despite all the shouty motivational slogans urging them to learn and move on.