Celebrating Failure

Our lunchtime question of the day (Bill Wurtz contributing): which candidate would you hire; (1) the candidate with no business failures listed on her record, only a string of successes, (2) the candidate that has a mixture of failures and successes on his record, but has a good explanation for the external factors that led to the failures, none of which were his own mistakes, or (3) the candidate with a mixture of success and failures, admittedly having made mistakes along the way that contributed to the lack of success? Be careful asking this question in public - it can lead to a long and unfriendly lunch time conversation, depending on the personal experiences of the group. Personally, I think there is a right and a wrong answer on this one, and the answer "it depends" can't be used in this game. Of course, how you rationalize the right and wrong answer depends upon your understanding of human learning, self awareness, integrity and conflict management.

In the Navy, there always seemed to be those "golden boys" - the ones who somehow managed to be assigned to the perennial top-performing organizations. They were leaders in high performing and successful organizations that were high performing and successful before they arrived for their 2-year tour and long after they departed. Then there were others that somehow managed to draw all of the turn-around situations, continuously assigned to organizations with poor performance, with the assignment of turning them around. In which of these two groups would you expect to "learn" more about leadership? As a 12-year member of the latter group, I certainly have a strong opinion on the subject...

Does anyone actually "celebrate" their mistakes? What about "celebrating" their failures? To be sure, let's isolate our discussion of mistakes and failures to those that came out of honest efforts to succeed. Obvious illegal or unethical activities are excluded from this category - that's a different level of learning. Let's assume, for a minute, that after the fact, we are able to analyze and understand the faults in our logic and decision-making that led to the failure. Let's also assume that we have the insight to use this analysis to drive our decision-making in future situations with similar circumstances. We've just accomplished something called "learning" - couldn't this be cause for celebration?

I know, I know...you can learn just as much by making the correct decision the first time, right? Well, think about it...how much time to you spend dissecting the every move when the outcome was a success? I'll bet you do a lot more thorough post-mortem analysis if things did not turn out the way you expected. No one likes to be wrong - and you're much more motivated to prevent this situation in the future.

So, back to our candidates and my pointedly unfair question. Candidate #1 (aka "golden boy") has fewer learning opportunities - or alternatively, is not being forthright about his mis-steps. Not admitting to mistakes rarely works in a corporate setting. Candidate #2 (aka "the blamestormer") has everyone but himself to blame for his mistakes. While uncontrollable circumstances have a lot to do with success, the pattern of placing fault elsewhere can be very disruptive. So, in the absence of any other information - my preference is for candidate #3.


Of course, I would never hire anyone based on what they have already done. A new leader is brought in based on what they are going to do after they arrive. Which leads to the next emotionally debated topice: how do you predict success when choosing the "new guy"???