Leadership Resilience - Learning from Mistakes
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I was recently working with one of my San Francisco Bay Area executive coaching clients – the CEO of a boutique hotel and restaurant company. We had an enlightening coaching conversation about how he has handled failure and learned from his mistakes. We talked about how he was able to bounce back from failure by viewing business as a learning laboratory.


My executive coaching client and I further discussed how resilient leaders bounce back from adversity. He has an agile mind and insatiable curiosity.


My client and I shared how we both were saddened by the passing of Steve Jobs. Did you know that Steve Jobs was a college dropout, and got fired from his own company? So how did he turn his story into power, and create the most admired company in the world?



Steve Jobs and the success of Apple is an inspiration to all of us who want to tap into our creative genius. Steve Jobs was the Thomas Edison of our time, and the greatest thing we can do is learn from him and build on his incredible legacy. I am coaching my client to help his employees become more resilient, and create a culture where innovation requires both risk and reward.


Learning from Mistakes


“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche


Failure is one of life’s most common traumas, yet people’s responses to it vary widely. Many managers have learned to reframe personal and departmental setbacks by stating: “There are no mistakes, only learning opportunities”—and it’s a great sentiment. In practice, however, their companies often continue to view failures in the most negative light.


Part of the problem lies in our natural tendency to blame. We perceive and react to failure inappropriately. How can we learn anything if our energy is tied up in either assigning or avoiding blame? Still others overreact with self-criticism, which leads to stagnation and fears of taking future risks.


In the 1930s, psychologist Saul Rosenzweig proposed three broad personality categories for how we experience anger and frustration:

  • 1. Extrapunitive: Prone to unfairly blame others

  • 2. Impunitive: Denies that failure has occurred or one’s own role in it

  • 3. Intropunitive: Judges self too harshly and imagines failures where none exist


Extrapunitive responses are common in the business world. Because of socialization and other gender influences, women are more likely to be intropunitive.