Are your people failing enough?

Unless you are very lucky, your path to success is preceded by many failures – some perhaps seemingly devastating. The hallmark of every perennial winner is persistence to improve, coupled with acceptance that failure along the way is inevitable. Yet, it is not enough for a leader to have the courage to fail. She must be surrounded by workers who strive for success, but have learned to overcome the fear of failure.

Successful leaders and managers learn to seek and hire risk takers – not reckless, cavalier self-destructors, but those individuals whose desire to succeed and achieve overcomes their fear of failing in front of others, and whose self-esteem can be knocked to the mat. They pick themselves up and try again.

Like all good leaders, they don’t regard failure as a pursuit or something to embrace. They view it as an inevitability of trying something different and perhaps bold, and reflect on it and learn from it before trying again.

Consistently successful managers surround themselves with such people, and use job interviews cleverly as a way to identify them by asking pointed, probing questions:

Tell me about something important that you wanted to accomplish, but failed to achieve. What did you next do?
What is the first major failure you can recall in your life? How did you deal with it?
What is the difference among people who winners and others? How do you recognize each of them?
How long will you stick with a task and fail before acknowledging that it’s time to move on?
What are some particularly satisfying accomplishments in your life? Tell me how they came about.
Who are the people who have inspired you in your life? Why?
What is it about you that inspires others?
Tell me what you think about Vince Lombardi’s quote, “Winners never quit, and quitters never win?

Of course, most successful managers learned how to hire well after many hiring “misses”. They kept at it until they were good. Ex-GE CEO Jack Welch, a passionate manager of people, claimed that the best hit rate he could achieve in hiring was 3 out of 4 successes.

Imagine how much money a baseball player could command who had a .750 batting average.

Written by Michael

Michael Douglas has held senior positions in sales, marketing and general management since 1980, and spent 20 years at Sun Microsystems, most recently as VP, Global Marketing. His experience includes start-ups, mid-market and enterprises. He's currently VP Enterprise Go-to-Market for NVIDIA.