4 · What to do when you get it wrong
Podcast show notes
Today I tackle a topic many of us shy away from – dealing with failure.
We often link our self-worth to our competence, especially as women in leadership roles. This episode is about changing how we view failure, moving from shame to innovation and growth.
I share insights on how reframing our response to mistakes can lead to increased creativity and performance, both personally and within our teams.
It’s a call to embrace failure as a stepping stone, not a setback.
Here are the highlights
(01:39) Gender bias in hiring
(03:09) The impact of shame and blame on women in leadership
(07:11) Embracing failure and personal growth
(09:45) Promoting a growth mindset
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Welcome to Frustrated and Exhausted, the podcast for women in leadership, where I help you fulfil your ambitions without sacrificing your sanity, or your resilience.
Welcome to episode four, of Frustrated and Exhausted. Today, I'm going to be talking about what to do when you get it wrong. We all fail, it's a fact of life, from the moment we're born until we go to the grave, we get stuff wrong.
And it's how we learn. You know, if you think about a young child, you know, when they're in that real sponge phase, and they're picking stuff up and putting it in their mouths, they're toppling over and picking themselves up again, they're learning. And it's how we all learn. The thing is, as we get older, we really sometimes don't feel like learning. In fact, it can feel really precarious. I believe this is especially true for women. Because we often base our own perception of our value around competence, around how good we are at something.
So in this episode, I'm going to be talking about why that matters for us in leadership roles. And I’m going to suggest potentially that we need to start reframing our thinking around failure in quite a big way. And getting a lot more comfortable with it.
I came across a really great quote on leanin.org the other day, and I was having a skit about and it was a female president of a tech company who said that women are hired for what they have done, men are hired for what they can become. Women have to have a proven record, but men do not. And for me, this just encapsulates that belief that so many of us have that we have to just prove ourselves again, and again, and again, and it becomes this real driver for us. And that belief is based on historical fact.
You know, there is no doubt that women have had to prove over time, you know, if they're sitting next to a man in an interview, and they're both going for the same role, historically, they have had to be better in order to get that role, they can't just be the same, they have to prove that they're better and better. So they have to be more competent than the person next to them. And this means, you know, we have this intrinsic belief, I guess that competence is going to be rewarded at some point in our careers. But it has a real negative effect too at times. And that can mean that it becomes more scary, more vulnerable to fail, it means that our relationship with failure becomes more extreme, potentially than it needs to be necessarily.
Now, when we feel that we've failed, it's often accompanied by a deep sense of shame. And, you know, this shame response is something that's hardwired into a part of our brains called the hippocampus when we're children. It's part of our learning process. It's where we store the memories that particular behaviours are deemed unacceptable, you know, socially, when we're learning how to live in society and regulate ourselves.
But it pops up in our adult lives as well. And I don't know about you, but I can recall quite a few times, one in particular, where when I think about that particular failure, and it was delivered on a board paper that probably shouldn't have been written in the first place that I should have challenged a lot earlier, but didn't. And I think about sitting down at that table and starting to speak. And honestly, I can sit here right now and my cheeks feel like they're burning. I still feel the shame that went alongside that total flop, that was that board paper, and it really still sits with me now it's there in my memory, and I can still feel that sense of shame that I felt at the time.
Now, that can be quite normal. A lot of people, you know, do something they shouldn't have done, whether that's in terms of an output like mine was or whether it's in terms of a behaviour, you know, you've not handled a difficult conversation particularly well, or you've kind of lost it a bit with somebody when you shouldn't have or you've not stood up for somebody potentially when you should have, you know, who's getting in the neck from somebody else? All sorts of scenarios where we can consider that we failed, whether that's like I said in terms of our output, or whether that's in terms of of our behaviours and how we are behaving in line with our own values and what we expect of ourselves.
But the shame and blame that can sit around failure, you know, really, obviously different company cultures can have different blame cultures, different individuals, depending on their experiences in life can have really different approaches to blame and shame. But the bottom line for women in leadership is that if we are sitting with that worry or failure, we're really staying quite stuck, potentially. We're not learning as much if we gave ourselves permission to feel more readily, you know, it can really keep us in more of a fixed mindset than a growth mindset.
You know, there's been a lot of work done around growth mindset, they teach it in schools these days, which I think is amazing, the work of Carol Dweck, who's at Stanford uni. This growth mindset is about a mindset for learning and success and resilience, you know, those things that can keep us in high performance.
So if we kind of stay in, we sit and we start to need to really feel safe, because we don't want to feel that shame, and we don't want to be blamed. It has a few impacts, you know, we can start to avoid instances where we feel we might fail, you know. How often have you gone “Oh, I'd really like to do that. But what if I fail?” and you've stopped yourself. That can mean that we miss out on opportunities to develop, to grow. It can really keep us stuck in a rut as well, both in our own thinking and in our careers. Because if you don't take some of those opportunities, if you don't take some of those risks, if you keep playing it safe, then you will miss out on on possibilities and opportunities to go further and develop more and be better at what you do and who you are.
Now, obviously, we all work in a context and you know, different organisations have very different cultures, some have quite a hierarchical response to failure. And, you know, there can be a real blame culture around that. And that can really inhibit us. So you know, if you're, if you're sitting in that place, and you're feeling frustrated by and you feel like it's keeping you small, then not to put too fine a point on it, you might want to think about how long you're staying there.
If you work in an organisation where there's kind of a mix of culture, and it sort of depends on who your boss is, then that's something that you're going to have to judge. But when you are trying something new, when you're trying to do something to change things and improve things and innovate, if someone is starting to get a bit blamey with you when it goes wrong, well a. hopefully you've done your homework and tied things up with them before you start to let them know that you're going to be doing that thing. But b. if you know that you've done it for the right reasons. And that the failure is not anything to do with lack of competence, then you can challenge, you can challenge back, you know. You get to decide. They might want to push blame onto you, you get to decide whether you want to take it or not.
So just to kind of quickly summarise where we've got to so far. I've talked a bit about kind of reframing our thinking around failure, you know, we need to fail in order to innovate. We need to fail in order to really learn, we just need to fail quite fast. The faster we fail, the quicker we learn the lessons, the better the output or the outcome. In the end.
You need to think about what types of failure is potentially more triggering for you. Is it failure when it's kind of an outcome that just hasn't worked out? Or is it sort of failure over behaviour? Is there something in your behaviours that you feel like let you down, that you're kind of not being who you really want to be in your leadership role? And I've talked a bit about why this is so important for women, when we, generally speaking, place such a huge emphasis on competence and our own competence as part of our professional identity. That's natural, but we need to be really careful that it doesn't keep us stuck.
So I've got a couple of questions for you just to help you think through what you might want to do order to reframe your relationship with failure, and just embrace a little bit more, give a good old hug.
The first is to think about how do you respond to yourself when you feel what is it that you're saying to yourself? Are you internalising blame? Have you got a little soundtrack going on in your mind of “oh my god, I shouldn't have done that.” “Oh, could have done,stupid me.” If that is you? And you're really kicking yourself after something happens? How can you show yourself some compassion? Is that how you would speak to someone else?
The other thing is thinking about how you can avoid the blame game. Now that can be cultural in organisations and I get that, but how can you avoid it? So what approach are you going to take? If a member of your team fails, gets it wrong, makes a mistake, how are you going to handle it?
If someone tries to blame you for something, how can you challenge that blame and show how unproductive it is?
Yes, take responsibility for the mistake. But how can you play back to them, hold that mirror up and say, yeah, this is unhelpful. Actually, we're not learning anything from this.
And the third thing is to think about role modelling. Organisations are not just made up of one culture. There are multiple cultures within any organisation. If we want our team to be the one performing at their peak, if we really want to harness their innovation and creativity, we need to show them that it's okay to fail, to make mistakes, to learn, to dust yourself off and go again.
So I want you to ask yourself, how am I role modelling failure to my teams so that they can see not just here, but see that failure is acceptable. And know that they won't be blamed or shamed?
You know, remember that feeling that we talked about, that feeling of shame is palpable. Everybody wants to avoid that. But in avoiding it, if we're in a culture where we feel like we're going to be blamed or shamed, we also avoid innovation and creativity, and the opportunity to make things better.
I hope that's been helpful. I think it is a really important area for women to think about. It's not something I've always been particularly comfortable with. But thinking about it from a perspective of innovation and creativity, thinking about it from the perspective of actually giving yourself some permission and some freedom, in a way can help you to start to reframe some of this for yourself, maybe help you start to be a little bit braver in some of the things that you're doing and the approaches you're taking.
And in those moments where it's a bit stressful and something's gone wrong, take a breath. Remember what you've heard in this podcast today. And think about what is the approach I want to take to this? How am I going to respond to this so that it's a genuine response, not a reaction.
Give yourself some space to think. There's a lot in all of this. Some of it's about confidence. Some of it's about competence. Some of it's about just being a little bit freer with yourself.
If you want to start to build some confidence, I would highly recommend downloading a guide I've created to finding your voice and being heard. Again, I'll pop the link in the show notes. Thanks so much for being with me today.
I hope you've enjoyed it. Take care. Speak soon.
Thanks for listening to this episode of Frustrated and Exhausted.
Hit the follow button for future episodes. You can also follow me on Instagram @resonateleadership and LinkedIn at Ruth Alexandra Wood. I would absolutely love to hear from you. Frustrated and Exhausted is brought to you by Resonate Leadership and the wonderful team at the Podcast Boutique. I'm your host, Ruth Wood. Take care and speak to you soon.
