{"id":146821,"date":"2026-04-02T08:00:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-02T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/trainingindustry.com\/?post_type=articles&p=146821"},"modified":"2026-03-19T15:15:58","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T19:15:58","slug":"making-failure-part-of-leadership-development","status":"publish","type":"articles","link":"https:\/\/trainingindustry.com\/articles\/leadership\/making-failure-part-of-leadership-development\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Failure Part of Leadership Development"},"author":52,"featured_media":146823,"template":"","tags":[3764,3004,30615],"class_list":["post-146821","articles","type-articles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-corporate-training","tag-growth-mindset","tag-learning-from-failure","global_topic_tax-diversity-equity-and-inclusion","global_topic_tax-leadership"],"acf":{"sponsored":false,"gated":false,"gated_content_type":"","file_attachment":null,"gated_content":"","form_instruction_header":"To access the full article, please fill out the form below:","pardot_html_embed":"","author_override":true,"author_name":"Deborah Grayson Riegel and Fiona M. Macaulay","author_image":"","author_bio":"Deborah Grayson Riegel is a keynote speaker, executive coach, and consultant who has taught leadership communication for Wharton Business School, Duke\u2019s Fuqua Business School, Columbia Business School\u2019s Women in Leadership Program, and the Beijing International MBA program at Peking University. She writes on leadership communication and presentation skills for Harvard Business Review, Inc., Psychology Today, Forbes and Fast Company.\r\n\r\nFiona M. Macaulay is an award-winning social entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and author who helps Fortune 500 and social impact leaders transform failure into competitive advantage through resilience and strategic risk-taking. A women's leadership expert, she is founder and CEO of the Women for Impactful Leadership Development Network (WILD), connecting 25,000 leaders across 100 countries, and serves as professor and entrepreneur-in-residence at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business.\r\n\r\nDeborah and Fiona are the authors of \u201cAim High and Bounce Back: A Successful Woman\u2019s Guide to Rethinking and Rising Up from Failure\u201d (River Grove, 2026).","excerpt":"Organizations that make failure safe create stronger leaders, better decisions and a culture that actually learns.","main_content":"As a training professional, you likely believe your organization has a learning culture. But if failure doesn\u2019t feel safe, you\u2019re missing a key ingredient in that culture. Failure is the engine of learning, and when it can\u2019t be named, examined or shared, the engine stalls.\r\n\r\nThe cost is high. When leaders feel like they can\u2019t fail, they hide their mistakes rather than surfacing them early, when the fallout could be mitigated. Innovation suffers due to risk-aversion. Top performers stop taking stretch assignments. Trust morphs into blame. And while training departments are busy teaching people how to succeed, they may not be preparing people for how to fail and recover.\r\n\r\nThink about a failure a leader in your organization experienced last quarter. Could it become part of your leadership development<\/a> curriculum rather than something to be ignored, or worse, covered up? In the right setting, with the right framing, it can. The most powerful shift an organization can make is the decision, made visibly and consistently, that learning from failure is expected, supported and valued.\r\n

Not All Failure Is the Same<\/h2>\r\nOne of the most common mistakes in how we think about failure is treating it as a single, undifferentiated experience. In our book, \u201cAim High and Bounce Back: A Successful Woman\u2019s Guide for Rethinking and Rising Up from Failure,\u201d we identify five distinct failure patterns, each requiring a different training intervention.\r\n

1.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Concrete failure: When the numbers don\u2019t lie.<\/h3>\r\nExamples of concrete failure include a leader missing their quota, a sales team getting a proposal rejected or a product team having their big launch fall flat. These failures sting, but they\u2019re measurable and data rich. Training professionals can leverage the data from these failures by teaching structured post-project debrief protocols that normalize outcome review as learning, not judgment or punishment.\r\n

2. Circumstantial failure: When life happens to you.<\/h3>\r\nCircumstantial failure might look like a leader suddenly departing, and their team is left dealing with the mess they\u2019ve left behind. Training professionals can help people separate what\u2019s within their control from what isn\u2019t. This protects the employees\u2019 self-worth and enables strategic decision-making about what to do next.\r\n

3. Perceived failure: When the world calls it wrong and you know it isn\u2019t.<\/h3>\r\nThis may look like when an employee makes a decision aligned with their personal values \u2014 such as setting a boundary or declining a stretch assignment \u2014 and gets labeled as quitting, giving up or not being a team player. Training departments can offer values-clarity exercises and self-trust frameworks that help employees name their own reasoning with confidence, without needing external validation.\r\n

4. Identity failure: When success feels like a stranger\u2019s achievement.<\/h3>\r\nFor example: The employee is hitting every external marker of success, and yet, feels hollow. They aren\u2019t being misread; they\u2019ve genuinely lost track of their own values after years of adapting and performing.The training application is leadership identity work, values-alignment coaching and early warning signal recognition.\r\n

5. Paralysis failure: When fear wins before you start.<\/h3>\r\nParalysis failure may look like an employee never applying for the promotion, a key initiative that was never launched or a difficult conversation<\/a> that is perpetually deferred. Training professionals need to teach leaders to distinguish preparation from perfectionism and build the muscle for strategic imperfection. Giving leaders language for these five patterns is itself a learning and development (L&D) intervention. Naming what kind of failure you\u2019re navigating is a prerequisite for learning from it.\r\n

What \u201cSafe Failure\u201d Looks Like In Practice<\/h2>\r\nUnderstanding failure patterns is only half the picture. The other half is building the organizational conditions in which leaders can actually talk about them. That requires more than a stated commitment to psychological safety. It requires structural design and a model worth studying.\r\n\r\nThe WILD Network\u2019s Leadership FailLab, launched by co-author Fiona Macaulay in 2021, is a great example. The format is deliberately simple: accomplished women deliver short, unvarnished talks about real leadership failures. This included project collapses, team breakdowns and strategic decisions that backfired badly. They leaned into the learning from moments where they lost the trust of their teams, dropped the ball on something important or ignored warning signs they clearly wish they hadn\u2019t.\r\n\r\nOver four years, more than 30 senior women leaders have stepped onto that stage. And what happens in the room afterward is remarkably consistent: The audience doesn\u2019t respond with pity or judgment. They exhale. And that exhale is a permission structure. When one accomplished leader names a real failure out loud \u2014 with specificity and without spin \u2014 it creates permission for everyone else in the room to stop hiding theirs. The performance that many leaders feel of having it all figured out becomes unnecessary. And the leaders who deliver these talks don\u2019t leave the stage less credible or less ambitious. They leave more grounded in their ambition, because they now know exactly what they\u2019re capable of bouncing back from.\r\n\r\nFour years of the Fail Lab points to a clear design principle: You don\u2019t build psychological safety<\/a> by declaring it. You build it by demonstrating it, repeatedly, at the level of leadership where it\u2019s most visible. The talk format works because it is structural and intentional. It\u2019s not an open invitation to vent, but a designed container with a clear purpose. That distinction matters enormously for how it lands in the room and how it spreads through an organization.\r\n\r\nOrganizations can build similar permission structures through failure retrospectives, \u201cwhat I learned\u201d storytelling as a standing agenda item, or formal programs modeled on the Fail Lab itself. The mechanism matters less than the intent: Failure must be treated as information worth sharing, not a liability worth hiding.\r\n

Strategies Training Professionals Can Implement Now<\/h2>\r\nNo matter the size of your organization, you can implement strategies that help your leaders and teams improve their willingness to discuss failures and their ability to bounce back stronger than before.\r\n\r\nIt\u2019s not enough to teach people how to succeed. Curricula that only develop performance skills leave leaders unprepared for what happens when those skills aren\u2019t enough. Failure navigation is a core leadership competency, not a soft-skill add-on. Resilience, resourcefulness and recovery training belongs alongside strategy and decision-making.\r\n\r\nPart of that training should include structured formats for failure storytelling. Instead of offering open-ended hope that psychological safety will emerge on its own, design intentional containers in which professionals at all levels can share what didn\u2019t work and what they learned. This should be reinforced by changing what gets measured, rewarded and remembered. Recognition systems that only reward outcomes teach people to hide failure. When organizations celebrate courageous attempts, transparent learning and honest early escalation, they send a structural signal that learning matters.\r\n\r\nFinally, notice and name the uneven ground. Failure carries different costs for different people. The consequences of visible failure are not evenly distributed across gender, race or role. Training programs that ignore this miss the reality many professionals at all levels are navigating. Acknowledging structural inequity is central to this work.\r\n\r\nFailure is inevitable. Learning is a leadership decision. The right question to consider is, \u201cWhat have we built that makes it safe to say something hard?\u201d And it starts with the people \u2014 you \u2014\u00a0most responsible for making that decision possible.","full_width":false,"content_band":[{"acf_fc_layout":"social_callout","blockquote":" The most powerful shift an organization can make is the decision, made visibly and consistently, that learning from failure is expected, supported and valued."},{"acf_fc_layout":"content_area","wysiwyg":"[hubspot type=\"form\" portal=\"47185625\" id=\"d6691839-f235-46df-adb5-e44aeea30da0\" version=\"v4\"]"}],"tice_sponsors":"","custom_dfp_keywords":""},"yoast_head":"\nBuilding a Learning Culture Where Failure Drives Growth<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Create a learning culture where failure is safe, enabling leaders to learn, adapt and improve performance effectively.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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