Two years into working at a Fortune 500 company, a high-performing vice president was asked to join the C-suite. She was thrust into the role without preparation, resulting in a case of imposter syndrome that left her mirroring others who had held the position previously. This impersonation not only left her feeling overwhelmed and falling behind; it also impacted her team’s performance. It was a blow to her confidence and sense of belonging. She felt like a failure.
Whether a smaller misstep or a career-impacting blunder, perceived failure is a common experience, including among great leaders. Ambitious individuals who regularly make big bets and play to win will sometimes fail. But those who emerge successfully from it, who bounce forward from a setback, demonstrate resilience to turn failure into growth.
The book The Journey of Leadership outlines McKinsey’s step-by-step approach to transforming leaders professionally and personally, reinforced by reflections and learnings from leaders around the globe. Through our work, we’ve found that the most successful leaders channel their energy into learning from setbacks and moving forward quickly, instead of wallowing or spiraling. The best leaders embrace the potential for failure, as to avoid failure is to avoid learning.
The Journey of Leadership champions an inside-out approach, in which leaders use introspection to learn who they are and what they stand for. When experiencing failure, a resilient way forward begins with recontextualizing the issue, extracting the lesson, and adjusting the approach.
Step one: Recontextualize the issue
It’s important to have a practice to help bring yourself out of negative thoughts and overcome the urge to defend, protect, or conform when the fear of failure arises. Under stress, when the stakes feel high, it is easy to become reactive. You might create simple stories, like the failure being either someone else’s or entirely your own fault; start to think in black and white; and lose your ability to embrace multiple perspectives. You may default into fixed mindsets (e.g., certainty, expert, scarcity), which stops all learning.
Instead, lean into your fears, exhale the tension, reground yourself, and ask the questions “How might I be wrong about the situation?” and “What other stories could be equally true?” Such questions can help you gain additional perspectives. Hit the pause button, take a deep breath, and explore what is likely a more complex issue than your interpretation of singular cause and effect.
Step two: Extract the lesson
Expanding your perspective can help you gain insights into the situation. For instance, maybe your valued colleague has good advice that you could benefit from, if you let go of the need to always have the answer. Or perhaps there are market signals calling for a change in course that are only visible when you embrace a more curious mindset.
In either example, you can gain additional insight into who you are and how you respond when you have a similar experience or a trigger evokes the same conditioned reaction. In both cases, asking for, listening to, and trusting the perspectives of others—as the book suggests, demonstrating the characteristic of humility with a curiosity mindset—could result in a different outcome the next time. It may help to ask, “Who am I when I’m at my best, and what can I learn from this?”
Step three: Adjust the approach
Once you gain the ability to hold multiple perspectives, even opposing ones, and shift to a mindset of curiosity, it is important to carry the learning forward and experiment with new behaviors. It may help to ask questions like “What could I experiment with to create a different outcome?” or “What is the smallest action that could make the biggest difference in creating the outcomes I desire?”
For the C-level executive at the beginning of our post, shifting her perceived failure into a learning moment led her to broaden her perspective and elevate her leadership to handle more complex issues, inherent to the executive role. She built a team to fill the gaps she identified in her knowledge, experience, and skills, and together surpassed a stretch goal that no one at the company had achieved previously.
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In the face of increasing complexity, leaders need to learn faster and grow more complex themselves by embracing multiple perspectives and responding instead of reacting. The ability to consider a situation in light of the bigger picture can help to develop a measured view and identify a path forward to emerge stronger.
This self-reflection can help leaders maintain focus on their purpose, so a perceived failure doesn’t impact the course of what they’ve set out to achieve. Setbacks will come, but it’s the leaders who embrace each situation as an opportunity to learn and grow who come out stronger and lead everyone to achieve a higher level of impact.
The authors would like to thank Hans-Werner Kaas, Dana Maor, Ramesh Srinivasan, and Kurt Strovink for the opportunity to publish this piece based on their recently published book, The Journey of Leadership, which has more on taking an inside-out approach and leading with resilience. Johanne Lavoie was a core contributor and thought partner in the development of The Journey of Leadership.