How to Get a Return on Failure

Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley a Maxwell Leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. One of the greatest, I would say just return on our time here inside the studio is when we hear while we’re on the road that people are taking these lessons, sharing them with your team and then opening up team meetings and saying, hey, for the first five, ten minutes, what’d you learn? What’s your number one takeaway? That’s why we do this. We want to encourage you to keep doing that. And there’s a learner guide that goes along with it. If you want to download that, you can go to MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. You can leave us a question, a thought that we can then an episode idea. Help out with Perry because we were just talking about the number of episodes that we’re currently at and I think he passed out and he’s tired.

Chris Goede:
But we would love to also help you guys in regards to your leadership journey. So don’t hesitate to. To leave anything on that form that you may want to do on that page. Well, today’s we’re going to actually talk a little bit about John Maxwell’s newest book. And this is how to Get a Return on Failure. So we’re excited to. To dive into this because this is a word Perry and I was just talking about this. This is where we try to avoid, if we’re being honest in our, in our personal journey and in a professional journey.

Chris Goede:
But what John brings out we’re going to talk about this is how do you then get the investment, the return, the ROI on that. It’s going to happen.

Perry Holley:
Yep.

Chris Goede:
I’m an enneagram3 for those that know. And that’s an achiever. And so it bothers me to, to know that potentially you’re going to fail, but it is absolutely going to happen.

Perry Holley:
I was just saying I would never pick this book up because.

Chris Goede:
That’s right. Because I started looking at them, I was like, we probably ought not to say that.

Perry Holley:
But once again, John written it in a way that it is extremely valuable. I got a lot out of it and I thought, well, I just don’t like the title. Maybe I don’t like the word failure. So you just said it. Well, word failure. But what I want to Talk about is how am I going to get from here to where I want to be and I want to get there as fast and effective. I don’t want to people, oh, fail fast, fail a lot, fail frequently. No, I don’t want to fail.

Perry Holley:
However, you’re going to fail. And the point of the book is how do you handle it? And then how do you, what I love, how do you help those on your team or those in your family who are going to suffer a setback and are going to quit or are going to back off or are going to miss the learning or miss the lesson or miss the return? And I just think that I wouldn’t have picked it up, but I’m really glad I did. Even though you made me, I really, I really enjoyed it.

Chris Goede:
John made him. But what I meant our mindset is how do we reduce risks, right? How do we protect outcomes? How do we avoid making those mistakes? But wouldn’t you agree that the most innovative teams and organizations are those that have figured out how to, to accept it and get a return on the failure? And if not, then you’re going to stifle, stifle that. So we’re going to dive into, to that thought and that idea today. And how do we get that return on the failure? Not just survive through it, but actually get a return from it and then leverage it for innovation and strategic growth inside your own personal journey, but also the organization or your team’s development.

Perry Holley:
And John points out that high performers, they don’t really avoid failure, they leverage it. And this asking, I don’t really ask the question about what’s the return on this failure. But, you know, what did I learn? But what does your. I know you make light of me being the more seasoned leader in the room, but you’re getting a little seasoned yourself there. So tell me, what have you. Has your view on failure changed over the years?

Chris Goede:
100.

Perry Holley:
How do you think so?

Chris Goede:
Because I’ve had the privilege of being in John’s organization for a long time. Time and time again. I have seen projects, I’ve seen ideas that even John or Mark Cole have come up with and we’ve started and they failed. And I thought, oh, that’s not going to be a good day around here. And I’ve seen us lose a lot of money on doing that. And it always fascinates me. Like, he doesn’t skip a beat. A beat.

Chris Goede:
He’s like, what’d you learn from it? Well, we learned these three things. Great. Don’t let it happen next time we do it, but let’s go. And I’m like, did you see the number of zeros behind the mistake that we made? It’s unbelievable. And so he’s not only, and I just don’t say that like he models that. He doesn’t miss 1 second of sleep if we have a serious failure inside the business and he just wants to know what we learned from it. So that has allowed me to, to get not comfortable with it. It’s allowed me to accept it and then use it as a growth tool even though the business may have took a hit from it.

Chris Goede:
It’s, it’s, it’s so I’ve been blessed because I can just buy maybe osmosis, maybe by being close proximity of watching him live that principle out. It’s it, it has changed the way

Perry Holley:
that I probably personifies another book he wrote on failure of 20 plus years ago called Failing Forward. So correct. That’s really been the essence of what we do here is we, we’re not afraid to take a risk and to try something new. But if it doesn’t work, then we, what did we learn and do we move forward. I’m looking where we sit now versus where, where we were in this at the setback. I even think you were saying about the money, the zeros about Elon Musk and they got this. I don’t know how many hundred billions of dollars are sitting on the launching pad. It goes about, I don’t know, 300 yards and blows up.

Perry Holley:
And you think he’s going to be devastated. He goes well know that didn’t work.

Chris Goede:
That’s right.

Perry Holley:
I go what, what? He goes, let’s go after action review. What did we learn? Yeah, you know what, you look forward two more explosions and now we’re putting people right on the moon. So yeah, it’s a, it’s all about learning from it to go.

Chris Goede:
And I love even failing Forward back in the day. Matter of fact, Margaret, his wife, after that book came out, she’s like, well John, you could write a whole series on failures. And, and he, and he and you. That’s the other thing about John too is he’s self deprecating about it. Right. He doesn’t take him too self too seriously. And I think that’s probably another lesson is yes, you and I like we’re driven for performance. Yeah, come on.

Chris Goede:
Like you’re not gonna take yourself that seriously, are you Chris?

Perry Holley:
Right?

Chris Goede:
And I’m like, yeah. So in the book he actually gets you to, to, to rethink what, what does failure really mean and it’s not your identity? This is a huge one for me. Huge one. Because when I don’t feel like I’ve lived up to my potential in anything, I automatically immediately go right to, I’m a business unidentity. Yeah, I do. And I’m like, everybody thinks that was horrible. Or I can’t believe, you know, whatever. It’s just an outcome of a project or a situation.

Chris Goede:
He goes in. He said, leaders must separate that emotion from evaluation, which I think is huge. And then he actually introduces the shift in language from, you’re not saying I failed, but, hey, that attempt produced X, Y and Z. You could use it as data, you could use it as leadership principles, but whatever, it’s not a failure. It’s a, hey, this thing produced X. And so then he has this quote in the book where he says, failure becomes dangerous when it is emotional, but it becomes valuable when it’s analytical. Now he’s speaking my language because I tend to lean towards the analytical side of things. And so really love that quote.

Perry Holley:
Well, I want to ask you about a concept he had around, which is very interesting to me, around good misses and bad misses. And he talks about a good miss being rooted in effort, intention, learning. Bad misses are rooted in avoidance, denial, lack of discipline, those types of things. If you began looking at and actually using this common language with your team and with your kids or, you know, in your home, I think, and just saying, was that a good miss or a bad miss? What are your thoughts on that? When you think back about the journey we’ve had here, and you said about some big misses, some small misses, but was it definable? Can you. Can you picture which one’s a good miss or bad miss?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, so I think I was thinking about this ahead of time, and some of this aligns with what’s in the book. But I was thinking through a couple of different examples. First of all, let me say this. I think from a good or a bad miss, they’re both learning opportunities. Because some people could look at a good miss and say, yeah, I learned this from it, but a bad miss is what it is. I think they’re both incredible learning opportunities if you dissect it. So on the bad miss, one of the things that I have seen show up was there was lack of alignment of what we were going after in regards to the organization. Whatever it was, whatever the goal was, it didn’t necessarily align with the organization of where we were going.

Chris Goede:
And so some people in the entrepreneurial world would call that a detached business. Right? Like, don’t start another business unless it’s somehow or another attached to what you’re already doing. So I saw some alignment issues. And then the other thing is lack of ownership. I’ve seen plenty of times where people would start something and then just didn’t have the ownership to follow it all the way through. And that I would call a bad miss. On the good side, for me, it was that man I saw really good effort. I felt like they were disciplined as they talked about in the book.

Chris Goede:
And they also had the right goal in mind. Like it was headed in the right direction. Because it’s one of those things where, you know, you’ve seen things where you go, why are they doing that? Right? Like, what is it? It made me also think about the. What was it? The new old Coke, Remember a long time ago? Like, was that a good miss or was that a bad miss? Right, like. And so you can kind of evaluate those things overall. Hear me say this. You’re going to have good and bad misses, but learn from them both because they’re important. But I think you can tell the difference between the two and learn from them.

Chris Goede:
So, yeah, yeah, I think there’s all. I think all those happen on a daily basis.

Perry Holley:
You make a miss and I think we’ll go back to Elon Musk. So they had an explosion and he could say, well, it was the weather or it was, you know, the wind was higher than we thought. He starts blaming. He never does that, but he says, so we. A good miss would be let’s analyze a sensor misgave and it spewed oxygen over you.

Chris Goede:
That’s right.

Perry Holley:
The good miss is analyzing it and saying, well, what? Where did it come apart? It’s not anybody’s fault. It’s just we need to find out what do we need to do to improve on that versus blaming the conditions or the weather. And I thought you brought that up about ownership, I think is such a key piece of how failure becomes a return on failure. Because when you take ownership.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, totally agree. The other thing I think you’ll really enjoy in this book is John lays out a process or a model. He calls it the failure to success cycle. And so it starts like this. Hey, you’re going to test something and just know you’re going to fail. What are you going to learn from it? So that’s number three is learn and then how do you improve it? And then re enter that cycle. And what we often see is that I know in my own Personal life. Like I get to number two there, the fail.

Chris Goede:
And then I’m just like, I’m out, like I’m going to quit. Or maybe I get to three and I’m like, okay, yeah, I learned that. But then I don’t improve it and jump back in. I just try to take the lesson and maybe apply it to somewhere else. And so it’s test fail, learn, improve, and then re enter. And I think if you figure out how to continually do that and embrace the full loop as a leader and as a team, it’ll make a big difference. And so my question, I guess for you is when you read this, when you, you learned trying to apply, does this need to be a formal process that is called out by, by leaders and executed by the team or is it, is it a language? Like what do you think this, this does for leaders?

Perry Holley:
You know, I like that question because you think about the five levels we use when we talk about why should you embrace the five levels of leadership? We call it a common language. Is a common language of leadership. If everyone on your team is talking a common language, then we know where we are. Wow, you’re really at level three of you. Have you done the level two work or you and I were going to see a client. You said, hey Perry, I really want to spend some level two before we get to level three. What was Chris telling me? Hey, we don’t know these. Let’s, let’s build some rapport.

Perry Holley:
Let’s get to know them before we jump into our proposal. But you’ve also called me and we, we’re very relational. So we get on the phone and we can spend 27 minutes of a 30 minute call catching up and then not have time to do the business. But you’ll get on the phone and you’ll say, hey Perry, I need to go level three. Yeah, what are you telling me? I need to get the business because John wants something, I’m on the hook, you have it. I don’t have time and I don’t love you any less, but I need level three. So this common lane was I like this, the cycle, the failure to success cycle for having common language. And if I think as a leader, if I started doing this, he may be even having to draw a picture.

Perry Holley:
And when things don’t go the way we want, let’s say, where are we in the cycle? And the reason why I think it’s important is because you’ll see where we test something we fail. That’s a good place to get out of the cycle right there is that. Well, that didn’t work. And then we. Yeah, I’m out. But if you can continue on to learn and then improve and then come back and test again. And John, we hear it all the time. You’re never good the first time and most likely not the second time.

Perry Holley:
But we kind of expect that we are. And I’m going to do that. Thinking about a team I had once and I had. There was a woman on there. She was so talented, and. But when she made a mistake, she just wanted to quit. And I. So I actually put a little sign up and said, fail forward.

Perry Holley:
Fail forward. That was my coaching to her. That’s just part of it. Let’s just fail forward. And there’s a guy on the team who is also very talented, but he. I had to make a new sign that said, make all new mistakes today,

Chris Goede:
not the same ones, because he kept

Perry Holley:
making the same mistake. So I find if we had this process, you can’t. You absolutely have to fail forward, and you cannot make the same mistake again if you’re doing it properly to do that. So I think it’s got a lot of. Yeah.

Chris Goede:
So I. I think I was just thinking too, even. Let’s talk about another personal application really quick. You are an incredible. What I would call keynote, large stage speaker. And you think about this like, I know you just all of a sudden had all these things that you probably failed, but you learned a lot, right. And you reproved and then reentered. And now when you get on a stage, you still do that.

Chris Goede:
You still learn at probably incrementals, not the big one we all started. Right. But it’s the same thing in your personal leadership journey, whatever you’re working on. And Perry is a gifted communicator from stage, and he tests things all the time in front of rooms, and some don’t work. And he comes back and goes, we’re gonna have to fix that and change that.

Perry Holley:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
And then we learned from it, and then we improved it and we reenter. We did we do this with content?

Perry Holley:
We just had it the other day. Yeah. We’re looking at one going, I wrote it.

Chris Goede:
Yeah. You’re like, who wrote this?

Perry Holley:
And I went out and delivered it and came back, okay, we can’t do this. What I said. Yeah.

Chris Goede:
So it works.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. We tested it. It was not. It did not work. What do we learn? I got some help. Susan jumped in and we, okay, we can improve it now. And then we test it again. Let her teach it.

Perry Holley:
She goes, yeah. And Then we’re, now we’ve got it. We’ve iterated and now we’re, we’re re entering the test again. But we’re going to get it right.

Chris Goede:
That’s right.

Perry Holley:
We’re not going to quit.

Chris Goede:
That’s a great example to do that.

Perry Holley:
Another concept John mentions called embrace hard. If you embrace hard, you build resilience. And, and he kind of gets into ex. You do this by expecting failure and prepare for it. That. And then we say you’re never good the first time. It makes you wonder if embracing hard is really a leadership discipline. And I know John will say and I’ve.

Perry Holley:
You’ve learned it. I’ve learned it firsthand. Is that everything worth doing is uphill. Yeah. Everything worth doing is hard to some extent and it’s going to be challenging. Is that this idea of failure, building humility? I think it kind of goes back to some talks we’ve also had on this, on this podcast about balancing confidence and humility. A very highly confident leader.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
With if that without the humility you can struggle. Failure could shut you down. And instead of going back to the process, to the cycle and saying no, it’s just we just learned something that didn’t work, let’s find something that does. But what are your thoughts on.

Chris Goede:
Well, I think that as a leader and we can talk about resilience a ton, but I do think as leader, this is an example of modeling resilience in a way. Right. You think about the 10 the bonus rules of resilience. And, and when you’re in failure, those should be on the top of your mind and it’ll help you learn it. So are you modeling that as a leader or, and, or maybe you’re just expecting it from others and you don’t allow yourself to do the same thing. And so to your point, you see a word like this and depending on how you’re wired.

Perry Holley:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
Right there. You just expect other people to be resilient, but you’re like, yeah, not me. And so I think as leaders we really need to look internally and figure out how are we handling this. And you can do it on the outside, but my question is how you. What’s the self talk that’s going on? Are you self sabotaging your way through it or are you really thinking about it like the cycle that we shared with you and taking advantage of whatever you didn’t complete and whatever we’ll call as failure and learning from it? Because I promise if you do it, you’ll always be thinking Your creativity will go, right, like even just back to the content conversation. You guys tried some things that were different and then you delivered. You’re like, oh, that’s really good. We never tried it before, but this one didn’t really work.

Chris Goede:
And it’s just, it’s a process. So if you want to, if you want to get a really good jump on how do I get a return on failure? Here are a couple things for you as we wrap up. First, change the conversation. The self talk, right? And yes, maybe it didn’t go the way you wanted to felt. But then ask yourself, what do we learn from it? Remember the conversation I just said that John has with us? Okay, that’s fine. Well, what did we learn? Tell me what we learned from it. And so what is that return you’re going to get from every setback? Second, differentiate your failures. Help your team understand the difference between the good misses and the bad misses that Perry and I broke down for you.

Chris Goede:
Third, build that cycle. Put it somewhere where you can see it. Maybe it’s on your mirror, maybe it’s on your sticky note on your laptop or your workstation. But make sure you think about that and be consistent with it. And then finally, model the mindset. As we were just talking about, your team, they’re watching you all the time and you’re leading by example. And so when you fail, first of all, step up and admit it. And then how you react in the moment and then sharing with them what you learned will begin to change the culture that the team and the mindset that the team has around failure.

Chris Goede:
And it’ll make a world of difference in, in the production of your team.

Perry Holley:
I will tell you that the book, while I had a copy in my hand, I went ahead and bought a copy on audible as well. And when you get the audio version, John reads it, which I really love. I walk every day and walking, I feel like I’m walking with John. He’s talking in my ear.

Chris Goede:
I love it.

Perry Holley:
But at the end of every chapter he gives a little off script couple of paragraphs where he just defines what that chapter was about. He was self deprecating and he, he mentions about how many more books on failure does he need to write he that he could write a bunch of those. So you should get the book. I did find it very helpful and I would recommend it highly. You can, as Chris said, you go to MaxwellLeadership.com/ExecutivePodcast. You can learn more about our offerings. You can fill out a form there if you’d like to talk about something with one of us or our team. We love to talk to you.

Perry Holley:
We love hearing from you, leave a comment or a question from there. That’s always well received here, but we love hearing from you and grateful that you spend this time with us today. That’s all from the Maxwell Leadership Executive Podcast.

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