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Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, it's not noise, it's just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled Success and Failure, the Leadership Mindset that Changes Everything. Here we go. There's a question I've been sitting with lately. And it's one I think every leader needs to wrestle with honestly. What do you actually do with failure? Not how do you talk about it in a performance review, not how you spin it in an all hands meeting. What do you actually do with it privately as a leader? Here's what I've noticed after years of working with senior leaders and executive teams. Most of them are exceptional at celebrating success. They know how to debrief a win, build on momentum, press their advantage. That's a real skill. But when failure shows up, and it always does, many of those same leaders go quiet. They move on fast. They treat the loss like a thing to get past rather than a thing to learn from. And that habit may be costing them. John Maxwell said in his newest book, How to Get a Return on Failure, that we should not be thinking about success versus failure. Instead, we should be thinking about success and failure. Let's think about that again. Not success or failure, not success versus failure, success and failure. Not to get too English major on you here, but that conjunction carries everything. Think about the mental model most of us were handed coming up. You succeed or you fail, you win or you lose. You're on the right side or the wrong side of the result. That binary gets reinforced everywhere. In school, in performance systems, in boardrooms. in how we talk about leaders publicly. We celebrate the ones who turned it around, were quieter about what it actually took to get there. John Maxwell is asking us to collapse that binary, not to stop caring about the results, but to stop letting the category of the result determine whether or not you're paying attention. Here's where people misread this idea. They hear success and failure, and they think it means failure is fine, that outcomes don't matter. that you can miss targets and just call it a learning experience. That's not it. The and is not permission to fail casually. It's a demand to fail usefully. There's a big difference. One is comfort. The other is discipline. Here's the reframe that I want to offer. Failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is often the prerequisite for it. Every experienced leader I've ever sat with can trace a major professional success directly back to a failure they processed honestly. The product that didn't ship correctly. The team that fell apart. The strategy that made sense on paper and collapsed in execution. Not because those failures were good things, but because the leader decided to stay in the discomfort long enough to learn something real. When you treat failure as data, something shifts. You stop being defensive and start being curious. You stop managing how the loss looks and start asking why it happened. And that's where leadership judgment actually develops. Not in the wins. In the honest accounting of everything. Here's the question I want to leave you with. Think about the last significant failure on your team or in your own work. Did you debrief it with the same energy you would a major win? Did you sit with it long enough to understand not just what went wrong, but what it revealed about your assumptions, your process, or maybe your blind spots? Most of us don't do that. We move on. and moving on feels like resilience. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's avoidance dressed up as momentum. Maxwell's challenge is to hold both. Be someone who pursues success relentlessly and learns from failure honestly. Build a team where both outcomes are mined for insight, where nobody is hiding a miss because they're afraid of what it says about them. Success and failure are not enemies. They are partners in the development of a leader. The binary we inherited the one that pits them against each other, limits how much we can grow. Because if failure is always just a loss, we will always be managing our exposure to it instead of extracting value from it. The leaders I respect most are not the ones who failed the least. They're the ones who learned the most from what they lived through. And that's what John Maxwell is pointing out. Not a softer standard, a deeper one. Carry that with you.