how many times have you heard how important it is to allOW your employees to fail? the rationale is that you don't want to discourage decision-making and a reasonable amount of risk-taking. But are there some types of failure that should not be encouraged or condoned?

Lessons from a Football Coach

When I was 11 years old, my junior high school football coach taught me a very important lesson that I've never forgotten. He made a point of emphasizing that in sports, there are two distinctly different types of on-field failures. "Errors" - which he defined as doing the right thing but doing it incorrectly. And "Mistakes" - which he described as just plain doing the wrong thing. To illustrate, if you were a running back carrying the football and inadvertently tripped over one of your own linemen's feet resulting in a face plant, that would be an error. You were doing the right thing but goofed up. However, if you took the ball and raced toward the wrong goal, now that's a mistake. Clearly not the right thing to do. [I suppose if you tripped over one of your own teammate's feet WHILE running the wrong way, that would be a "fiasco."]

In my coach's mind, errors were an inevitable and acceptable aspect of learning. However, mistakes - heaven help you if you make a mistake - mistakes warranted a mortifying public tongue-lashing. They were unforgivable. Of course, if you didn't learn from your errors and continued to make the same one over and over and over again, you probably would never hear the end of that either. You could say you just converted an error to a mistake. 

Encouraging the Right Kinds of Failures

Yes, you absolutely want to encourage in your company careful, calculated risk-taking and initiative. Yes, we're all human and make both errors and (gulp) mistakes from time to time. But it's the CEO's responsibility to draw as clear a line as possible as to what types of failures are OK and what's not. A rule of thumb you could use is whether a mess-up could have and should have been easily avoided. It's certainly not unreasonable to insist on due diligence from yourself and employees.

The way you send and reinforce where the line is drawn is by both your company's documented values and your own behavior. How do you make important decisions yourself? What failures on the part of employees do you punish and which ones do you condone or even reward? And, incidentally, if I were you, I wouldn't condone avoidable failures that through dumb luck didn't cause any significant harm - but could have. That could come back to haunt you when you're not so lucky the next time.

The Importance of Process Discipline

In my experience, one of the most common causes of unnecessary failure for everyone from the entrepreneurship students that I mentor, to employees in my former company, and senior executives in general is skipping an important step in a process. In product development, it's just so tempting to save time by jumping right to the solution stage without doing the necessary clear problem-defining and up-front research. It's also common to be so excited about a possible solution to jump right to deploying it without validating with customers first through small scale testing. Or, how often do we fail to do the necessary after-implementation review to make sure everything is working as well as planned. Failures caused by omissions like these, to me, are some of the most frustrating mistakes because they are so easily avoided. Every step in an important process is there for a reason or it shouldn't be there. 

Examples from My Career

To further elaborate on good and bad failures, here are a couple of examples of each from my time as CEO at The First Years. 

• Errors (aka, "learning experiences")

- When I first introduced a process-oriented approach to running our business, we set out to document all of our key processes. Since this was new to us, we initially failed to build in the necessary level of flexibility to allow employees to vary their actions based on special circumstances. Designing and documenting processes was the right thing to do, but if we had done a better job, there would have been a lot less resistance to the concept in the early stages. 

- One of our largest customers begged us to produce an exclusive product line for them that they would design and market under their private label brand. I was hesitant, but our head of sales thought the repercussions from saying no would be severe. So, it was approved but with contract provisions we thought would minimize the risk to us. Predictably, the products didn't sell at all and a change of retail personnel to ones not involved in the original agreement resulted in us having to eat much of the cost. From a long-term standpoint, we did the right thing but it was a costly error at the time.

• Mistakes (aka, failures that could have been avoided)

- We once developed an innovative thermometer that made taking a baby's temperature safer and easier. We and every retail buyer we showed it to thought it was a sure winner. Unfortunately, we were so sure of success that we skipped the consumer validation step in our product development process. You can guess what happened. It wasn't pretty.

- Once when hiring a VP from outside the company, there was one candidate clearly better qualified than the others. I was so impressed with his talent and so anxious to fill the position that I failed to do the necessary homework to determine whether or not he would be a good cultural fit as well. That was a very costly and avoidable mistake.

Next Steps

1. Gather the appropriate members of  your team and discuss what your company's criteria should be for acceptable failure. 
2. Make it part of the statement of your cultural values that you give to all employees when they first join the company.
3. Regularly reinforce the values in words and actions.

As always, if you’d like more information or assistance regarding achieving your business and life goals or you just want someone to brainstorm, vent, or commiserate with, consider taking advantage of JPMA’s Executive Mentor Program by scheduling a Zoom, Skype, or Face Time session with me. I’d enjoy meeting you and helping you any way I can. Check the JPMA web site for more information or contact Reta Adler at  radler@jpma.org.

Ron Sidman was the founder and CEO of The First Years, Inc. and former Vice Chairman of the JPMA Board of Directors. He is currently a business consulting resource for JPMA members and serves on the Advisory Boards of both the School of Entrepreneurship and the Dean of the College of Education at Florida Gulf Coast University. Ron is also the President of Evolutionary Success, LLC, a life and business coaching company.