How effective are you at celebrating and learning from failure? - SmartBrief

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How effective are you at celebrating and learning from failure?

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Leadership

SmartPulse — our weekly nonscientific reader poll in SmartBrief on Leadership — tracks feedback from more than 210,000 business leaders. We run the poll question each week in our e-newsletter.

How effective are you at celebrating and learning from failure?

  • Very — Every failure is a learning opportunity 43%
  • Somewhat — Sometimes I celebrate failure but not always: 38%
  • Not very — I focus more on consequences than learning: 12% 
  • Not at all — There’s nothing to celebrate about failure: 6%

Learn something every day. I acknowledge it’s hard to “accept” failure. It’s more a matter of mindset. While a pattern of failure is clearly unacceptable, not learning something from every failure is a missed opportunity. The strongest leaders I know are great at both celebrating success and learning from failure. If you’re in the minority of this poll, reevaluate your approach to failure. Some of the greatest insights are to be had from our worst moments.

Mike Figliuolo is managing director of thoughtLEADERS, author of  the upcoming book “The Elegant Pitch: Create a Compelling Recommendation, Build Broad Support, and Get it Approved” and “One Piece of Paper: The Simple Approach to Powerful, Personal Leadership.”