The company where I work is restructuring and is being faced with an enormous amount of change and the proportionate amount of fear – the two are very comfortable bedfellows. One of the fears that management is grappling with is the fear of failure. We were writing our “Golden Rules” for our executive committee when the issue of failure was raised. It was clear the matter was raised from a place of fear in the context of “please don’t chastise and condemn me should one of my ideas fail”. This prompted our management consultant to send this extract from the Harvard Business Review:

Executives know that failure is an integral part of innovation. But how do they encourage the right kinds of mistakes? by Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes

“The fastest way to succeed,” IBM’s Thomas Watson, Sr., once said, “is to double your failure rate.” In recent years, more and more executives have embraced this point of view, coming to understand what innovators have always known: that failure is a prerequisite to invention. A business can’t develop a breakthrough product or process if it’s not willing to encourage risk taking and learn from subsequent mistakes.

The growing acceptance of failure is changing the way companies approach innovation. Some build exit strategies into their projects to ensure that doomed efforts don’t drag on indefinitely. Others, like the credit card company Capital One, continually conduct large numbers of market experiments knowing that while most of their tests won’t pay off, even the failures will provide valuable insights into customer preferences. Still others launch two or more projects with the same goal, sending teams in different directions simultaneously.

This approach – called “simultaneous management” by civil engineering professor Alexander Lauer – creates the potential for a healthy cross-fertilization of new ideas and techniques.

While companies are beginning to accept the value of failure in the abstract – at the level of corporate policies, processes, and practices – it’s an entirely different matter at the personal level. Everyone hates to fail. We assume, rationally or not, that we’ll suffer embarrassment and a loss of esteem and stature. And nowhere is the fear of failure more intense and debilitating than in the competitive world of business, where a mistake can mean losing a bonus, a promotion, or even a job.

During his years leading Monsanto, Robert Shapiro was struck by how terrified his employees were of failing. They had been trained to see an unsuccessful product or project as a personal rebuke. Shapiro tried hard to change that perception, knowing that it hindered the kind of creative thinking that fueled his business. He explained to his employees that every product and project was an experiment and that its backers failed only if their experiment was a halfhearted, careless effort with poor results. But a deliberate, well-thought-out effort that didn’t succeed was not only excusable but also desirable.

Such an approach to mistake making is characteristic of people we call “failure-tolerant leaders” – executives who, through their words and actions, help people overcome their fear of failure and, in the process, create a culture of intelligent risk taking that leads to sustained innovation. These leaders don’t just accept failure; they encourage it. We’ve studied a number of failure-tolerant leaders – in business, politics, sports, and science – and found some common threads in what they do. They try to break down the social and bureaucratic barriers that separate them from their followers. They engage at a personal level with the people they lead. They avoid giving either praise or criticism, preferring to take a nonjudgmental, analytical posture as they interact with staff. They openly admit their own mistakes rather than covering them up or shifting the blame. And they try to root out the destructive competitiveness built into most organizations.

First and foremost, though, failure-tolerant leaders push people to see beyond simplistic, traditional definitions of failure. They know that as long as someone views failure as the opposite of success rather than its complement, that person will never be able to take the risks necessary for innovation.

Remember that you are living one life with many interrelated aspects. So don’t be tempted to divide it into personal, emotional, spiritual, work, etc. and claim that certain areas are okay and others aren’t. Whatever part of you is in shadow affects your entire life but in different ways. Fear of failure in the office is amplified further in other aspects and could be holding you back personally. This would limit the innovation in your life – leaving you staid and frustrated. Life is a myriad of interrelated aspects that affect each other and cannot be fully divided. One aspect affects another. The person is as much a part of the job as the job is part of the person. If you are doing what you love (not only what you are good at) then your job becomes a real testing ground for life - a great place to try things out and see if they take you further along the route to your goal. But this then has to be rolled out into the rest of your life where it is more “risky” and “scary” sometimes. Be brave and push your boundaries; what’s the worst that can happen?