Sales Leaders Rule #14: Risk failure to achieve growth.

We have to embrace failure, it's an inevitable part of life. Everyone will fail at times in all the different roles that we have throughout the day. When people try to avoid failure they are really avoiding making an effort which robs them of the ability to grow and improve. This in turn prevents them from achieving success.

The key to embracing failure is to accept and learn from it while protecting self-esteem. Many people confuse role failure with personal failure which negatively impacts their self-confidence. Sales leaders need to instill the idea that everyone identifies themselves as a 10. While they might fail at their role, their self-worth should not diminish with that role failure.

Of course, the goal is to be a 10 in your roles too but we all have hundreds of roles to play in different facets of our lives, so it's impossible to be flawless all the time in all of our roles. If you allow a role failure to drag down your self-worth then it lowers the ceiling of how well you can perform going forward because people can only perform in their roles as they see themselves self-concept wise. If you make sure that you and your people see yourselves as a 10, then they can take the risks necessary to perform as that 10.

So what steps can a leader take to keep self-worth high? Institute the three P's in your leadership style, and people will be okay with failure.

Permission

Give people permission to fail and give them permission to tell you the truth about their failure. Directly telling the team that you give permission to tell the truth about their failures acknowledges that everyone will experience failure. They don't need to try and hide it because it's already been addressed. That gives them the ability to own it, learn from it and perform differently in the future.

Potency

When you talk to people, you want them to own up to what's going on so you can help them acknowledge and improve from past mistakes. Sugar coating failure is a lack of acknowledgement that seeks to deflect ownership and the lessons that come from owning a mistake.

Protected

Permission and potency are worthless without protection. Protection means that their honest admissions will be used only to improve their role performance. Getting the truth from your team is not an invitation to criticize. When your people tell you the truth it should be encouraged and not used against them during performance reviews or raises. This protection ensures that they will continually be honest and open about any mistakes.

The bottom line is, you can't have success without failure. Embrace it, celebrate it, and learn from it. As the team accepts failure as a route to roe improvement, greater successes will follow.