St. Louis Business Journal
Learning to fail well is an important skill

By Anna Navarro

September 2001 - Failure is part of everyone's repertoire. Some people are good at it while others . . . well, they fail at it.

A good failure is one where you can step back and admit you've made a mistake, learn from it and then let go and move on. You may come out bumped and bruised and it may be expensive. But you eventually heal and emerge in one piece and wiser.

Bad failures are full of blame, for yourself and others. Or they are mistakes that you deny but you are aware of in your heart. They are events that haunt you. People come out of bad failures crippled and damaged.

I see the effect of good and bad failure on a daily basis in people's careers.

Cindy had spent twelve years working up to the position she had as business director for the opthalmology department of a major medical school. With a $20 million dollar budget, a staff of ten and a salary approaching six figures, it was the kind of job to which she had long aspired.

She'd had a few misgivings before accepting the job due to some unpleasant encounters with the man who would be her boss. She had finessed them, but they had left her a little uneasy about him. Instead of pursuing her doubts, however, she brushed them aside. The opportunity was too good to pass up.

But the three years since she had taken the position had been sheer misery. Her boss attracted a lot of grant money to the institution. He had great relationships with the medical school's administration and his peers. But he was a bully to the people who worked for him.

Cindy had to cope with the way he treated her and because she was the buffer between him and the staff, she also had to bear the brunt of their resentment against him.

For a long time she alternated between denying the problem and blaming herself for not having enough skills to deal with the situation.

When she came to see me, my first task was to get her to see that she had made a big mistake by accepting the job. Her eagerness to be promoted had obscured her intuition that her boss would be difficult to work for. There was no way to change him, or develop skills to cope with his behavior.

Once she had acknowledged this, she had to face the fear that if she quit she'd get a lousy recommendation that might keep her from getting an equivalent job elsewhere.

Her fear proved to be well founded, but because we were able to anticipate it, we were able to diffuse the impact of her boss' harsh comments about her.

She launched a discrete job hunt and was offered the position of business director for the gynecology department of a smaller medical school in another city. After she had made it through several rounds of interviewing, she took the risk of explaining that they were unlikely to get a good reference from her current boss. She was frank about why, and asked what kind of evidence they needed to believe that she was telling the truth.

While her interviewers were initially taken aback by what she said, they were willing to explore the situation further, and agreed to talk to her predecessor in the job to check out her story. In the end, she was hired. She has now been in that position nearly two years, and is very satisfied with the job.

Consider what would have happened if Cindy had continued to deny her mistake, or blame herself for not having the skills to manage her boss.

Eventually she would probably have either exploded at him or made a serious error due to stress. In either case, she stood a good chance of being fired, which would have made her job-hunt much tougher and probably intensified her self-blame. The original mistake could have easily snowballed into a bad failure.

Instead she admitted she'd made a mistake, took several big risks to extract herself and paid the price of moving from the city in which she'd lived all her life to find a comparable job.

Today, she is thriving. She's begun to put the episode behind her and is settling into her new city. Perhaps most important, she's learned NEVER to ignore her intuition in favor of ambition. She managed to turn this bad mistake into a good failure.

Anna Navarro is the founder of Work Transitions, a nationwide career consulting firm that trains independent career strategists and consults with individual clients.

This column was originally published by the St. Louis Business Journal. The actual title of the column and date in which it appeared in the Business Journal may be slightly different from what appears on WorkTransitions.com.