Admitting Failure ... as a CEO.
One of the fundamental tenets of business is to admit your failures, so you can analyze them, congratulate your competitors who got it right, keep things in perspective.
(Oh yeah, and because honesty is important. We’ve kind of forgotten that one recently.)
One of the problems with people who lie about their failures, besides the unethical aspects of lying, is that they try to distort the realities of business. They create bad data and inject it into the systems and teach the people around them some bad habits. Product failures are not fatal; they are part of the normal business process of getting it right. Business failures aren’t even fatal, just part of the learning/building process.
Admitting that you were w-r-o-n-g is also a part of admitting failure and moving on from it.
In his book The H-P Way, David Packard of Hewlett Packard discusses openly the many failures he made while building one of the best companies in the world. They made plenty of mistakes and had lots of failures, but they used those experiences to improve. He had no problem admitting that he was wrong many times; being wrong allowed him to realise that he should hire “super-experts” in specific disciplines instead of trying to do everything himself.
I’ve also seen the opposite too many times –– a CEO standing his ground and refusing to admit failure until it’s too late, or never. That’s immaturity and will cause you to lose the respect of your employees and partners.
A great example is Uber. The arrogance and over-confidence of Travis Kalanick caused him to ignore tons of mistakes and failures and resulted in making Uber today much less than it could have been. He and Uber did a lot of things right, and invented a new industry, but then throttled their growth and acceptance by not admitting when he was wrong. That didn’t work out so well for him –– he was pushed out of his own company in 2017 by his own hand-picked board.
Failure is an important part of communication and reinforcing the lifecycle of a business, and giving and receiving respect, which makes it all run properly. Admit your failures, honestly, you’l. be a better and more successful CEO.
#CEO #startups #software #honesty
This post is part of The Startup CEO series by Tom Nora, discussing the life, psychology and experiences of startup ceos.