Failure and Your Personality: How To Respond To Failure Constructively
Failure is a part of life and also a part of owning a business. As a business owner, big failures can mean embarrassment, missed opportunities, or lost clients. The impact of failure can have far reaching consequences for you, your employees, and the business, but there are steps that can be taken to avoid this.
Some failures are part of learning how to be a business owner and can lead to personal growth, but how do you, as a business owner, mitigate the failures that can derail success?
What Does My Personality Have To Do With It?
A business owner’s personality can be a factor in the success or failure of a sale, a deal, or the business as a whole. When considering personality and success, you must consider the environment, the situation, and how you react.
To understand the implication of your actions when faced with failure, you must first understand your personality type.
What Is The Personality Of Failure?
Psychology research has identified eleven personality types that have reactions for failure that are dysfunctional. These eleven types make up about 70% of the population.
Psychologist Saul Rosenzweig proposed in the 1930’s that the eleven types fall under three categories; extrapunitive (blames others), impunitive (denies blame), and intropunitive (blames oneself). Women are more likely to be intropunitive than men for reasons that are not clear.
You can take an online test for free to find out where you stand. The 24 question test can be found HERE.
How Can I Alter My Response To Failure?
If you are surprised by the results of the test (or not) and see some areas for self-improvement, there are steps you can take.
Increase Your Self-Awareness
The first step is to become more aware of your personality and how it affects behavior. There are several tests that can be taken to determine your personality type, including the well known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. There are simplified free versions or you can take the full version with a membership payment.
The Big Five is another type of personality test that explains how to best describe a person, using the five personality variables that stand out the most. These are extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience.
Using the information you obtain from these resources, consider the impression that you are displaying to others.
Increase Your Awareness of Others
As a business owner, consider the person(s) you are addressing. Even if you think that your behavior was acceptable or an outcome was suitable, it does not mean that it will be perceived that way.
People form their own opinions based on their interpretation of events. That means that a business owner that is introverted and intropunitive may have to become comfortable being assertive when giving a sales pitch or when addressing an employee’s recurrent absences.
Further, a manager that is extrapunitive may have to take an extra second to consider the workplace culture before addressing a sub-par project. No matter the personality, it is important to consider what others may perceive.
Develop New Strategies
Sometimes failure is inevitable, but by exercising self-awareness, you can understand how to best address situations and react to adversity.
Practice Effective Communication
Feedback is necessary for understanding each other's thoughts and intentions. No one should have to be a mind reader to be a successful business owner. You can share your intentions when it comes to addressing blame or giving credit. It is also important to stop and listen when asking for feedback.
Don’t assume that you understand someone’s motivations any more than they should assume to know yours.
Reflect On Your Actions and Their Consequences
After a success or a failure, reflect on how the project or evaluation may have driven you towards different personality types. Consider how others around you reacted. Then consider what effect it had on the final decision or product.
Avoid Impulsiveness
Avoid the impulsive emotional reaction, no matter how necessary you may feel it is to express your feeling in that moment, it can cause problems down the line. Impulsivity can lead to prematurely blaming others or outbursts of frustration that can hurt your relationship with the people around you.
Find The Lesson In The Situation
Everyone makes mistakes, it’s a part of being human. Evaluating each mistake and failure will help you determine how to approach similar issues in the future. Say you forgot a project was due, it was incomplete, and your client was very upset.
The lesson may involve finding a better way to schedule due dates or a better way to manage your time. Sometimes there is no lesson and there is no one to blame. That in itself can be the lesson.
Sometimes things happen that are out of your control, but you can still control how you react to the situation and make the best of it.
“Successful people don’t fear failure but understand that it’s necessary to learn and grow from.”- Robert Kiyosaki
You Are Not Alone
Failure, no matter how small, can feel isolating. Remember that you are not alone. There are others that support you and want to see you succeed. Turn to colleagues you are close to, your partner, a friend, family, a job coach, or fellow business owners.
