The importance of building failure into your induction process

The original article can be found here.

I have led sales teams for over 10 years and have found that the earlier someone can experience failure the more successful they are likely to be in the long term. Assuming they are working hard and creating the necessary activity, often, someone who fails early goes on to be more successful than someone who only has very early success. Failure and rejection are crucial parts of the sales process, but the timing of them, I believe, is almost as important. And this doesn’t just apply to sales. I’ve now seen it to be an important part of an induction to a new role regardless of the department.

Learning the job

The first reason failure helps when starting a new role is for learning. If we find a successful way to do something the first time, we aren’t likely to look for alternative ways to do that task. We aren’t going to learn different tactics that we might need in the future. When failure inevitably comes, you haven’t learned the alternative ways to approach a task and it’s much harder to learn them when you have already experienced some success.

When we experience success early, everyone else will assume we know what we are doing. They are less likely to believe we need six-plus months of training for a new role. And, most likely, we feel the same way. We are less likely to look for help or to learn a new approach and more likely to blame our circumstances.

Build resilience

Especially in sales, resilience is essential. Failure and rejection are part of the job and we have to be comfortable with that in order to carry on. When we experience early success, we are not building that resilience. In contrast, the person who experiences failure early on builds that resilience.

We have to learn by getting things wrong early on in a new role. Because failure is accepted at this stage, even though it is uncomfortable, we can work through it and realize that success comes from continuing. When we fail for the first time later on in a role, it is unexpected and we might handle it worse. People at a later stage in a given role are far more likely to take this personally, question their ability and even leave a company.

Appreciate success

We rarely appreciate things we don’t have to work hard for or are given for free. Appreciation is built when we work for our goals and realize the effort it took to achieve them. This point is two-fold.

Firstly, if we see how hard something is to obtain and we don’t feel that the work is worth the reward, we can opt out early. Realizing how hard it is and deciding to persevere means we are likely to experience long-term success. Those who weren’t suited to the work will not have stayed, enforcing the point that early failure could be critical for long-term success.

Secondly, when we realize how hard something is to achieve, we value it and are more willing to work for it. I believe this is true in sales and all roles: Typically the harder we work, the more successful we become.

Making this part of your induction process

It is important to reframe failure to enable this process to work. Ask people what they have failed at, and celebrate when they do fail. Companies often talk about making it safe to fail as they want to allow space for new ideas. It is the idea behind Google’s OKRs where achieving the goal really means it wasn’t hard enough. Yet in reality, few of us put this into practice.

The No. 1 thing I would do to encourage this was to give someone a hard task first. I would give someone the hardest project as their first project. This is counter to how we often induct people where we give them easier tasks, allowing them to prove themselves before moving up. I would do the opposite, enabling them to fail, learn and come back stronger. Of course, there would be support and coaching throughout the process. The idea is to learn rather than just fail. But building in chances to fail can be important for that induction process.

Failure is uncomfortable, but with a growing understanding that it is essential for success, companies can find new strategies to embed this as part of their culture.