Everyone receives unwelcome gifts from time to time. The Christmas socks you’ll never wear, the stinky cheese that someone thinks you like, a useless tool for a job you never intend doing. The list is endless, but I believe that the biggest and the best unwelcome gift you can ever receive (especially early on in one’s career) is ‘failure’.

In all my years in business management, I hardly ever heard people talk about their failures. Their misadventures remained dark and hidden secrets, that perhaps only their partners or closest friends may have ever known about. Don’t misunderstand me, I am not talking about mistakes here; a bad choice or error. What I mean by failure is that an expected outcome one wanted, that after much effort and personal energy, never came about. A bankrupt business, or losing one’s job for not hitting targets, or even the failure of a large project to deliver its expected result.

I have heard some project managers refer to ‘Lessons Learned’. Where their PM processes say that a Lessons Learned session needs to take place within x months after the ending of a project. Too often, these efforts are not taken seriously and even worse, any findings they may have had quickly forgotten and not incorporated into the next project. It’s always too easy to blame failure on someone else, another department, an external supplier, or exceptional circumstances.

Earlier this month, I lead an interactive workshop on the topic of Failure. In it I shared some of my biggest failures, what happened, why, and what I learned from them. In turn, the delegates did the same. The experience was powerful and rewarding. I just wish that more companies and business organizations would do the same. Especially when there is a wide range of experience and age groups in the room.

It can be interesting for a retired businessperson to reflect on past failures, but it can be life changing for a young person to discover how to avoid the avoidable, especially if they are open to learn and passionate about doing well in their careers.

Thanks to The Bayard Partnership for organizing this workshop. We’ve had ‘The Absolute Secret to Success’ and ‘Self-Reinvention (Big Change) and now ‘Failure’. I wonder what the topic of next year’s workshop will be).