Failure Is an Option

<div style="font-size: 0.94em; line-height: 1.4;"><p align="justify">Ivey Business School Professor Emeritus Glenn Rowe has learned a lot about leadership by studying decision-making in the private sector, but his most valuable leadership lesson was learned as the officer-in-charge of Patrol Boat Standoff in the mid-1980s, when Rowe was a staff officer at a Canadian naval reserve division. On his first day as officer-in-charge, Rowe made an error that led to his ship’s grounding—a cardinal sin in any navy. This article—which Rowe co-authored with Ken Nason, another former Canadian naval officer with a second career in business—examines how failure can drive leadership development by highlighting how it positively affected Rowe’s career. Although we often hear that failure is not an option, this is a costly perspective. After all, failure shapes our character, restores focus, renews motivation, and teaches us about accountability, transparency, responsibility, adaptability, and ownership. Learning from failure, however, can’t happen unless one embraces failure as a teacher. When Rowe grounded his patrol boat, he learned the value of staying calm during a crisis and discovered that he had command ability. Earlier in his career, when approaching HMCS Preserver’s commanding officer to discuss issues tied to his performance, he didn’t save his job, but by admitting to himself and navy authorities that his performance was less than ideal, he avoided the “ostrich effect.”

• learning from mistakes
• embracing failure
• building resilience
• developing persistence