Learning 2 Lead Leading 2 Learn

Academic environments are built on critique. Peer review, tenure decisions, grant and award competitions, and traditional governance processes signal that scrutiny is a currency of academic life. While driving us towards excellence and innovation, our academic culture often renders invisible something central to learning: failure.

Timmermans and Sutherland (2020) share that “Stories of failure are powerful and intriguing.”  How do we as academic leaders create cultures where we learn from and make failure visible?

I’ve come to understand that failure is a deeply human experience that can transform our beliefs and assumptions about the world around us.  It connects us and leads us through profound learning and growth. 

Failure is hard to experience. It can destabilize our sense of identity, confidence, and competence. And yet, when we lean into the vulnerability surrounding failure, rather than away from it, failure becomes a site of genuine learning about ourselves, our relationships, our work, and the world around us.

Two interconnected concepts have shaped how I approach failure as a leader, academic, partner and mother: 1) psychological safety, and 2) self-compassion. Together, these concepts create the conditions in which failure can be examined rather than hidden.

Psychological safety, the belief that one can ask for help, offer candid feedback, speak up, ask questions, share ideas, make errors, and take risks without fear of repercussions is strongly associated with individual goal achievement, belonging, team learning, creativity, and organizational performance (Edmondson & Bransby, 2023). Leaders who listen, demonstrate competence, are transparent, and share learnings from feedback and failure enhance psychological safety (Edmondson & Bransby, 2023). 

Self-compassion involves responding to one’s own difficulty (including experiences of personal failure) with kindness, common humanity, and mindful awareness rather than harsh self-judgment (Neff, 2023).  Research shows that self-compassion supports well-being, actively enhances motivation and learning from failure, and it makes sustained risk-taking possible (Neff, 2023). 

Psychological safety and self-compassion make it safe to make mistakes and be wrong out loud.

THREE PRACTICAL STRATEGIES FOR MAKING FAILURE VISIBLE

1. Normalize failure through structured storytelling

Invite team members to share a “what I tried, what didn’t work, and what I learned” experience, and model this yourself first. Research confirms that leaders who openly acknowledge their own fallibility and learning signal that candor is expected (Edmondson & Bransby, 2023). Framing these stories through Neff’s (2023) lens of common humanity, “this is what growth looks like for all of us,” helps people recognize that struggle is shared, not shameful.

Action: Open your next team meeting with your own story of a recent mistake and what you learned.

2. Introduce the language of self-compassion into feedback culture

Self-compassion is a learnable skill, not a fixed trait we are born with (Neff, 2023). Leaders can build self-compassion vocabulary into everyday conversations: name the difficulty (mindfulness), connect it to shared human experience (common humanity), and respond with warmth rather than judgment (self-kindness). Research shows that people who engage in self-compassionate reflection after failure spend more time on improvement and learning, and demonstrate greater motivation and improved performance (Neff, 2023).

Action: When coaching a colleague through a setback, model the question: “What would you say to a colleague who experienced this?”

3. Create team agreements around mistakes and failure

Safety is not the absence of discomfort. It is the presence of conditions that make discomfort productive. Invite your team to co-create agreements for how they will show up when things feel risky and tough. Not all communication requires psychological safety. For example, sharing good news or best practices carries little interpersonal risk. What psychological safety uniquely enables is the harder kind of sharing: admitting a mistake, raising a concern, or exposing a gap in your knowledge. When we help our teams create conditions that normalize and support conversations that feel risky, we makes it more likely for these important conversations to happen (Edmondson & Bransby, 2023)

Action: Ask your team: “What would make it easier for each of us to be wrong out loud in this space?”

HELPING COLLEAGUES NAVIGATE FAILURE

Coaching provides a powerful approach to help colleagues navigate failure. Below, I’ve compiled a list of coaching questions to use, share, and adapt as you support others through their experiences of failure. These questions offer a starting point rather than a formula. Explore one or two questions that resonate with you and your context, and try them with individuals or teams. When we make failure more visible, we make transformative learning possible.

Making sense of what happened

• What actually occurred? How might this differ from your interpretation of it?
• What were you hoping for, and what got in the way?
• What factors were within your control, and which weren’t?
• If a trusted colleague described this situation, what would they say?

Exploring the inner experience

• What story are you telling yourself about what this failure means?
• What are you most afraid this says about you?
• Where do you feel this in your body, and what is that sensation trying to tell you?
• How are you treating yourself right now, and would you treat a friend the same way?

Reflecting on learning

• What does this failure reveal that success might have hidden?
• What would you do differently? What would you keep the same?
• What did you learn about yourself, your values, or your assumptions through this experience?
• What became possible because this didn’t work out the way you expected?

Reconnecting to agency

• What do you need right now from yourself and from others?
• What would it mean to hold this experience with curiosity rather than judgment?
• What strength or capacity did you draw on, even if the outcome wasn’t what you wanted?
• Who have you seen navigate failure with grace? What did they do that you admire?

Finding self-compassion

• If a dear friend came to you with this same experience, what would you say to them? How can you offer that to yourself?
• What would it feel like to be a kind witness to your own struggle, rather than a harsh judge?
• What does this moment of difficulty remind you that you share with every other human being who has ever tried and fallen short?

Moving forward

• A year from now, what will have made this experience worthwhile?
• What would courage look like at this moment?
• What are you ready to let go of, and what are you ready to carry forward?
• What’s one small step that would feel both meaningful and doable?

CONCLUSION

The research is clear. When we build psychological safety and self-compassion into the fabric of how our teams work, we are not simply being kind. We are creating the conditions that make learning, creativity, problem solving, innovation, and honest inquiry possible. Academic culture has long rewarded the performance of certainty. Perhaps our most important leadership act is demonstrating, visibly and repeatedly that mistakes and failures are OK and that we are still learning too.

REFERENCES

Edmondson, A. C., & Bransby, D. P. (2023). Psychological safety comes of age: Observed themes in an established literature. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, 55–78. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-120920-055217

Neff, K. D. (2023). Self-compassion: Theory, method, research, and intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 74, 193–218. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-032420-031047

Timmermans, J. A., & Sutherland, K. A. (2020). Wise academic development: learning from the ‘failure’ experiences of retired academic developers. International Journal for Academic Development, 25(1), 43–57. https://doi.org/10.1080/1360144X.2019.1704291