If there’s one thing Admiral William McRaven knows a lot about, it’s failure.
Not that he is a failure himself, of course. McRaven is the retired Navy SEAL commander who headed the effort to kill Osama bin Laden. He’s now the chancellor of the University of Texas, a bestselling author, and a lot of other impressive things. If his track record doesn’t qualify him as a successful leader, most of the rest of us are in big trouble.
Still, if you look at McRaven’s speeches and writings, you’ll see one common theme, over and over: failure.
When he talked to the cadets at West Point in 2014, for example, he told them:
“Nothing so steels you for battle like failure. … [T]he great ones know that when they fail, they must pick themselves up, learn from their mistakes and move on…. If you can’t stomach failure, then you will never be a great leader.“
When he gave the commencement address at the University of Texas, he said:
“Know that life is not fair and that you will fail often. But if take you take some risks, step up when the times are toughest, face down the bullies, lift up the downtrodden and never, ever give up … the generations that follow will live in a world far better than the one we have today.”
And then there’s the book he wrote, Make Your Bed, that rocketed up the New York Times bestseller list. McRaven included an entire chapter called: “Failure can make you stronger.”
So, why all the focus on failure? Because any leader who takes on great challenges will fall short at least some of the time. And what does the admiral have to say about reacting to failure? Two things, really: Drive on, and learn from the mistakes you make.
Zero-defect leadership (TL;DR: “not a good thing”)
One of the interesting paradoxes about military leadership is the degree to which accepting failure, and learning from it, becomes ingrained. In the U.S. Army, where I have a bit of experience, you can hardly cross the street without doing an after-action review (detailing what went well, what went poorly, and what can be improved next time).
Twenty years ago, a different attitude prevailed. This was the time of “zero defect leadership,” and great contortions to ensure that mistakes were never recorded (as if that meant they didn’t happen). It was the post-Cold War “drawdown,” and some officers who wanted to stay in uniform and excel believed a single error could ruin their careers.
This fear of failure was itself a big failure, for three key reasons (all of which seem obvious now, but weren’t so clear at the time):
- Nobody’s perfect–and it’s crazy to expect error-free results when you’re talking about armed combat, of all things!
- People who fear error also become averse to risk.
- It’s impossible to accomplish difficult things if you’re so afraid of risk that you hedge your efforts.
Ultimately, the military mentality changed, and McRaven, as a senior commander in one of the most storied specialties in the U.S. armed forces, fully embraced it.
“Great leaders accept the fact that sometimes you’re going to be right, sometimes you’re going to be wrong,” he told Inc.com recently. “Make the decision as best you can, and if you make a mistake, you go back and learn from that mistake.”
“I made a lot of mistakes”
It’s worth noting what prompted the change in the military. For one thing, some fantastic officers wound up leaving (not all, obviously). Then, of course there were the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the mistakes in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Largely, it was the repeated realization that risk is an inherent part of achieving success. That’s true in military campaigns, in business, in personal and career development–heck, even in love. Inevitably, where this risk, there is going to be some degree of failure along the way.
They key is to be brave enough to examine your failures, deconstruct them, figure out what you could have done better–and learn, so as to make fewer mistakes the next time.
“I made a lot of mistakes,” McRaven told Inc.com, reflecting on his 37 years as a military officer and a Navy SEAL commander. ” I like to think that every time I made a bad decision, I learned a little bit from that decision.”
If you want to be a great leader, take that to heart. Great leaders keep growing.
Nobody expects you to be perfect. But your team does have a right to expect you to be a little bit better than you were the last time you faced a similar challenge.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.