Failure as a leader is inevitable. But there are four ways that failure can enhance your skills as a leader.

Thomas Watson, the founder of IBM, once said, “That’s where success lies - on the far side of failure.” Leaders must anticipate and tolerate failure - it’s a subject no one wants to talk about. Certainly most leaders try their best to avoid it, but the best leaders are formed and tempered by failure along the way. There are several ways that failure enhances leadership.

One of the most obvious ways failure enhances leadership is that you learn from it - if you allow yourself. There are corporate and political leaders who absolutely will not admit when an idea or process has failed. But the ones who do admit it tend to take the lessons learned, apply them, and make a success the next time. Think about learning - as a leader, your learning process should last a lifetime. This doesn’t necessarily restrict itself to learning from mentors, peers, or classrooms. John F. Kennedy said that “leadership and learning are indispensable to each other”. So what happens when you make a mistake that leads to failure? First, you learn from the experience. You can look at the entire process, procedure, or idea to find the nuts and bolts that went wrong. Second, you learn from others - the ones who were involved to begin with. Listen to the people who watched the idea fail - they’ll respect you more and you’ll have great ideas about what not to do the next time. Third, you’ll have a learning experience that will help you with your long-term view.

Failure as a leader allows you to measure your own strength and your own limitations. One of the biggest questions a leader asks him or herself is, “when do I draw the line and admit that I’m wrong, that this idea has failed?” Obviously, the answer to this question depends on each individual and situation, but each failure allows you to “fine tune” your point of admission. Consider the fact that failure may be in degrees - the first failure could be of the greatest degree, but if you’ve learned, the next failure may be of a more minor degree. When it comes to measuring strength, Jack Welch is a proponent of the stretch: “Boundaryless people…have an absolute infinite capacity to improve everything.” As a leader, your failure could mean that you give a team another chance to meet the goal - everyone involved knows the risks, the limits, and the lessons learned. In this way, failure creates a greater framework to accomplish fantastic goals.

Leaders must persist in generating ideas, change, and motivation. Failure at any time teaches persistence. Silent movie star Mary Pickford once said, “What we call failure is not the falling down, but the staying down”. Leaders can live by this quotation. It’s easy to lose your confidence and doubt your leadership ability after failure but again, you must anticipate failure. It’s not a matter of “if” you’ll fail, but actually “when” you’ll fail. So if you fall, you simply cannot stay down - it’s time to admit a mistake, pick yourself up, and keep moving. One of your biggest duties as a leader is to advocate and create change. A failure can only become a change if you’re persistent about it, if you consistently try to make the change happen in the face of failure. Turn persistence to the people you lead - by staying with an issue, you’ll probably be able to empower your teams a little more each time. You learn from mistakes, you measure your “stretch” for the next attempt, and you set a larger framework for the team. In this sense, failure creates persistence, which, in turn creates empowerment. For the leader, this is a win-win situation.

Failure as a leader should keep you humble. Humility has often been seen as a weakness in a leader. But think about how humility can be used as a valuable tool: leaders who are not humble may end up letting the grandeur of their own position block their view of what’s actually going on. A big head can lead to further bad decisions, so if you’ve already learned when to say you’ve failed, step back and be humble about it. On the other hand, humility will help you downplay your own role in success and allow the team to take credit for a job well done. Another benefit of humility is that you learn to listen. Part of Welch’s strategy at General Electric was the “Work Out” concept, in which business units were able to go through a problem solving session without their managers and supervisors. The “Work Out” concept arose from the fact that Welch insisted that leaders listen to the folks who were doing the job. If you’ve learned humility as a leader, you know that you don’t have all the answers. You don’t react badly when someone tells you things you didn’t know - you thank them for providing new knowledge and assure them that their input will be used. Being humble also means that you can insert your knowledge and wisdom into your conversations without letting your team feel stupid or undervalued. When you fail, remember humility and keep it with you as you move forward - your humble attitude will boost your presence as a leader.

There is no need to fear failure as a leader. Your fear will only make you risk-averse and afraid to speak up. If you fear failure, you won’t learn from it. Remember that failure is a learning experience, it helps you measure your strengths, it teaches persistence, and it keeps you humble. Anticipate your own failure and tolerate the failure of others. If you keep these things in mind, failure will be, in the words of John Keats, your “highway to success.”