You Should Know: Failure [A Preview]
In my day job at 100 Coaches, we just launched a new monthly addition to The 100 Coaches Newsletter, which Scott Osman created six years ago. Now reaching 60,000 readers, the new monthly bonus will include a leadership lesson we’ve been thinking about, and a series of recommended articles we’ve been reading.
I’ve included a preview below, this time about failure.
You Should Know: Failure
At 100 Coaches, we work every day to match senior executives at market-leading organizations with world class coaches. To do our job well, we strive to intimately understand the changing needs of value-creating leaders.
This month, we’ve been considering a key moment of inflection in the career of any leader: Failure.
Although many of us have heard that failure can be a catalyst for growth, Amy Edmonson’s book, The Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well, teaches that one reason failure can be a good thing has to do with who you surround yourself with.
If you are facing a decision right now and worried that it might lead to a potential failure, Edmonson says you should do three things before you pull the trigger:
Pause
Look at just the facts
Build community
Although the first two steps might be intuitive to some, it’s the third step that most stands out, and that’s the one we want to dig into today. What is it about building community that can help in the face of failure?
A number of things, it turns out.
Edmonson, currently the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School, is renowned for her groundbreaking research on psychological safety in the workplace and organizational learning.
Her influential work on team dynamics has transformed how organizations approach innovation, and her last book, The Fearless Organization, has become essential reading for leaders seeking to foster environments where people can speak up, take risks, and learn from mistakes. What she is perhaps best known for is developing the concept of “psychological safety”, which she defines as "a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking."
Importantly, the framework to failing well discussed in The Right Kind of Wrong reflects her broader work on psychological safety in organizations, emphasizing that how we deal with failure isn't something we should do in isolation. Ultimately, having support structures and collaborative relationships helps us process failure more effectively, learn from it, and move forward constructively. In this way, we can best learn, grow, and try again.
Here at 100 Coaches, we’ve spent many years building and cultivating our community, and it is at the core of what we do. In that spirit, here is some of what we’ve been reading, consuming, and sharing lately in the space of leadership advancement and executive coaching.
We hope you learn, enjoy and share with yours.
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” ― Amy C. Edmondson
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Links
…in the world of leadership
…in executive coaching
BetterUp announces their AI coaching product, reporting that it’s powered by 17 million data points.
Is Organizational Coaching a Must-Have or a Nice-to-Have for Companies? A new webinar by one of our 100 coaches.
Coaching Real Leaders, the HBR podcast that lets you into real coaching sessions, has a new season out now.
Our new guide, When Coaching Matters Most: 3 Things Every HR Leader Needs to Know to Ensure Executive Coaching Success.
…at 100 Coaches
Marshall Goldsmith had a big birthday, and we brought 100+ of our nearest and dearest together for it!
Jacquelyn Lane shares her thoughts on why Becoming Coachable was a game-changing book for the coaching industry
This is a preview of The 100 Coaches Newsletter, which reaches 60,000 leaders (and readers!) weekly.
I love this, Claire. Sometimes I wonder when I keep starting new things, given that so many of the old things I've started end in failure! But that's failure only in terms of making money or finding acceptance or turning into something bigger, when maybe the measure is the pleasure and challenge of doing it and the growth and enlightenment involved.