Hello     

  "So many people can be responsible for your success, 

 but only you are responsible for your failure."

Author Unknown

Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, states that 'people don't rise from nothing...we owe something to parentage and patronage'. He goes on to suggest that 'great feats of success could not be possible without a confluence of circumstances, conditions and people.'

Why is it that success is shared, but failure is yours alone? If we don't succeed alone, then we surely don't fail alone. 

Isn't it just as logical to acknowledge that great failures, like great feats of  success, could not be possible without a confluence of circumstances, conditions, and people?

We are taught from an early age: 'don't let success go to your head'.

I would offer this add-on to that edict: 'and don't let failure go to your head, either.

Ingesting failure (rather than metabolizing it by identifying the confluence of circumstances, conditions, and people around it) is the easy way to usher in victim energy into your being and give those around you an invitation to ditch their accountability.

Leadership (self or organizational) through failure is about clear articulation of the reality of the situation, the circumstances that brought the reality into being, and the lessons to be learned to avoid a repeat performance. It is also about showing the path forward to create the post-failure world.

Imagine the organizational impact of this type of speech from an executive being held accountable for poor quarterly performance?:

'I'd like to thank all those who helped to contribute to this failure. None of this could have been possible had it not been for the sales team's 40% under delivery of new revenue, the customer care team's 88% poor service ratings, the manufacturing team's delivery of two key faulty products, and the drought in India which wreaked economic havoc in our most lucrative markets.'

Or, a death row inmate's final statement reading something like this:

'I'd like to say that all of this was made possible, in no small part, by the numerous cracks in the social system through which I consistently fell, my abusive parents whose inner demons drove them to physically abuse me until I ran away from home at age 10, my 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade teachers who failed to acknowledge my illiteracy and passed me on to each other, and the countless social workers who knew my case number but not the color of my eyes. '

If you're going to choose to ingest a failure, be sure to metabolize it completely.

Greetings!  

Mike

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