Recover with honor
Transform your failures into opportunities that define your character
By Jim Huling
February 2009
I’m sorry to call you so
late,” said Cynthia, the senior project manager on one
of my company’s largest consulting projects. The clock
beside my bed showed 3 a.m.,
and I knew from experience
that this call would not bring
good news.
“The new system is scheduled to go live in three days,
but we’ve just discovered a
problem,” she said.
I could hear the urgency in
her voice as well as the
sounds of her team scrambling in the background.
“One of the major features of
the system has a fatal error
that only occurs under very
specific circumstances,”
Cynthia said. “We can fix it,
but we’ll need two weeks.
There’s no way we can
make the launch date.”
I was stunned fully
awake when I realized
what this would mean to
our client. Intense preparations, including international travel, training, press
releases and a public
launch celebration, would
have to be postponed.
I dreaded the thought of the
call I would now have to
make.
When you fail, be the
first to admit it
Over the next few hours, I
reviewed the problem in
detail, listened to explanations
of why our testing process had
failed to detect it and carefully
planned the message I would
give to our client. But through
it all, I was fighting the temptation to keep the problem
hidden.
Each time I thought of calling our client, I imagined a
series of reasons why full disclosure wasn’t necessary. My
mind raced with rationalizations, including the high likelihood that the error wouldn’t
be discovered and could be
quietly resolved in the background without the client ever
knowing it existed.
But then I asked myself a
simple, but powerful, question
— What would I want someone else to do in the same situation? The answer was
immediate and clear: I would
want to hear the full truth as
quickly as possible. A few
minutes later, I placed the call.
When you face your next
failure, you will be tempted to
either hide or deny it — a
temptation made stronger by
all the times you have seen
others respond in this way.
But if you have the courage to
disclose all the facts, no matter how painful, you will begin
to rebuild trust with those
who depend on you.
When you fail, take
personal responsibility
for the resolution
The most important statement I made in my call to the
client was, “I take full responsibility for the resolution.”
Making this statement elevated my commitment from the
level of an organizational
imperative to the higher level
of a personal promise. It also
created an accountability that
kept me going through the
long days and nights that followed as we worked to fix
the problem.
Success belongs to everyone on the team, but failure
must be owned by the leader.
The next time you fail,
make yourself publicly and
personally accountable for
the resolution. Become the
leader who is willing to
place your own reputation at
stake. When you do, you’ll
find that this level of commitment not only drives your
performance, but it also
earns the respect of everyone around you.
When you fail,
be willing to learn
It was hard for me to accept
all that happened on this project. I had wanted to be the
leader who stood proudly at
the podium during the launch
celebration — not the leader
who had to admit and own a
major failure.
But a single failure can
teach you more than a dozen
successes if you are humble
enough to learn. By accepting, and recovering, from
this failure I was forced to
grow in ways that I now
know were essential to my
future success.
Throughout your life and
your career, you will
inevitably experience failure,
particularly if you are
attempting great things.
When you do, remember that
it is not failure that defines
your character; it’s how you
recover.
Choose to recover with
excellence and with honor,
and you will transform your
mistakes into the experiences that ultimately make
you the leader and the person you want to be.
JIM HULING is CEO of The Jim Huling Group, a strategic consulting company enabling leaders and
their teams to achieve extraordinary results. Jim’s leadership experience spans more than 30 years,
including a decade as CEO of a company recognized four times as one of the “25 Best Companies to Work
For in America.” Jim is also a nationally recognized keynote speaker and the author of “Choose Your Life!
a powerful proven method for creating the life you want.” He can be reached at jim@jimhuling.com.
