What to Do if Things Failed Under Your Business Leadership

Business failure

Business leaders have to make difficult decisions all the time. You consider different ideas, but it will be down to what you believe should happen next. You may analyze important factors like the economic system, current market, how your business performs, and many others. Despite your efforts to make a sound decision, things can still go the opposite direction. These are the things you should do once failures happened under your leadership. 

Own up to your mistake

Own up to your mistake

You can’t be too proud about your wrong decision and pretend like you did everything right. You also can’t throw the blame on other people. While you considered other suggestions, you ultimately made the choice. Explain why you made such a decision and own up to your mistake. It doesn’t make you less of a leader to admit that you’re not perfect. You will still get blame for your failure, but you’re not making it worse by deflecting blame. 

Determine the path forward 

You can’t stay where you are now. You have to move on and not let this failure prevent you from doing better things. Think of ways to improve your company’s performance in the future. It won’t be easy, but you can’t let anything stop you. This time, you have to do something different. You might also listen to other people instead of pretending you know everything. You will be given a chance by the people you work with, and you must make the most of it. 

Find others people to form your core team

While you take the blame for the failure, you also recognize that there were others who pushed you towards the wrong path. It doesn’t mean you will pour the blame on them, but you must trust others to help you this time. Perhaps, your core team doesn’t have sufficient experience and you need other perspectives. There’s no harm in reshuffling the people on the inner circle.

Conduct a study to determine what went wrong

You can’t fail and move on like nothing happened. Use your experience to do better. List everything that led to that horrible failure and don’t let it happen again. Otherwise, expect another failure soon. Be willing to take the risk and think outside the box. If you tried the safe route and it failed, something else might work. 

Don’t think you’re a bad leader

Just because you failed at a project doesn’t mean you’re a horrible leader. You can still make it up in the future. Don’t let this failure define you. If you succeed in something else soon, everyone will forget what happened. You will also inspire your colleagues to keep pushing even amid failures. 

Even the top business leaders now did terrible mistakes before. Others even brought their entire business plan, but managed to move forward. You can do the same if you don’t let yourself get discouraged by what happened. Besides, if you already gave up, your colleagues might head in the same direction. 

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1st and featured image from https://assets.entrepreneur.com/content/3×2/2000/20180822193353-GettyImages-597274404.jpeg

2nd image from https://www.opstart.ca/9-reasons-why-most-businesses-fail-in-the-first-year/