Yes Yes Yes – it’s the “F” word again

Naked Leader Week – 242 – Monday 28 January 2008

Leadership from a different perspective – Andy Turner

Yes Yes Yes – it’s the “F” word again

 Failure has had more coverage in NL Week’s than it may deserve, but AND, here is yet another angle. After my first – ever “Naked Coach” event in London, when I shared some powe4rful ways to remove the fear of failure from our lives, Andy Turner came up with the following, powerful addition. While aspects of this have been touched on in The Naked Leader books, Andy writes more eloquently than I ever did:

The Route to success is failure!!
This seems to be a conflicting statement at first glance, but think for a moment what your view of failure is. 

Initial thoughts are all negative; failure means the end, failure is de-motivating, failure means your not right, but why?
We have all been conditioned that failure is bad, it’s the end. We need to view failure not as being not right, but, “Not right now”. Failure is merely a stage to success.

If you want to make a difference, to stand out from the crowd, you need to be innovative.

 Innovation by its very nature is new, creative, it pushes boundaries. Nothing new & ground breaking is every achieved from a single idea. It needs developing and therefore would have had many failure points.
I argue that every success is born from failure; it’s just that the failures associated with ultimate successes are never talked about.
An example is the humble light bulb. Did Thomas Edison invent and make it first time. No, he simply discovered 1000’s of ways of how not to make a light bulb, before achieving his aim and being successful.
I am not suggesting that every failure will ultimately be successful, but by not embracing & encouraging failure, will seriously inhibit & stifle the potential successes and innovation of the future.

I call upon all businesses & coaches to physically remove the negative fears of failure. Demonstrate in a controlled low risk fashion that failures are a positive aspect of success. There is nothing more liberating for an employee to know that they cannot fail, give them at an early stage “Enough rope to hang themselves” but never let them dangle. It will show them that failures are not damaging and should not be feared.

By removing the fear of failure at an early stage of an employees development & continue to encourage them to make failures throughout their careers, will ultimately bring success. Because to make a difference & not to maintain the status quo in an ever changing environment we all need to discover how not to do things, in order to make things happen.

Andy Turner
Head of Customer Marketing
Wells & Young’s Brewing Company

Right, my best wishes to you all in a bit of a hurry now – because I’m now inspired to fail, like never before…

David

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