How To Handle Mistakes Openly

Failing Is Good. Sharing Failure Is Great—Here’s Why (and the Difference) There’s a saying in leadership: “Fail fast, learn fast.” It’s useful, but here’s a more brutal truth I see every day as an executive coach—failing is good, but sharing your failure? That’s where greatness lives. Why? Because when you keep your setbacks to yourself, you learn and (hopefully) adapt. Good leaders do this all the time: they make mistakes, reflect quietly, and get a little bit better. But great leaders zoom out. They turn their tough moments—botched launches, missed deals, the uncomfortable conversations—into teachable stories for their teams. They debrief openly, admit what went sideways, and let others in on the real lessons. That’s not just transparency—it’s leadership with leverage. It shifts a culture from “hiding shortcomings” to “shared growth.” From my coaching chair, here’s what I see: → Teams led by “silent learners” improve slowly and in silos. → Teams led by “story-sharers” (even the humble, unpolished ones) build trust and adapt at light speed. My best work isn’t about helping leaders hide their failures. It’s helping them find language, timing, and confidence to share it: “Let’s dissect this together. Here’s what I missed, what I learned, and what I want us all to watch for next time.” The difference? Good leaders bounce back. Great leaders multiply learning. If you want to unlock not just your own growth but your entire team’s potential, start here: → Normalize quick, safe failure debriefs after every big project. → Model vulnerability. Admit you miss first. → Ask your people: “What would you do differently?”—and listen, really listen. → Set the expectation: we’re here to share learnings, not to get it perfect the first time. In leadership, it’s not how you fall that changes your culture; it's how you respond. It’s who learns—and how many—from how you get back up. Coaching can help; let's chat. Enjoy this? ♻️ Repost it to your network and follow Joshua Miller for more tips on coaching, leadership, career + mindset. #executivecoaching #leadership #professionaldevelopment #growthmindset #careeradvice #learning #success

Your company culture is determined not by what you say when things are calm, but by how you act when something goes wrong. Let me explain. One of my biggest frustrations as an employee and junior Army officer was leaders who *said* they encouraged risk taking...but when anything went wrong, immediately went into CYA mode. So now, as CEO, I am militant about building a culture that encourages innovation and smart risk taking. You know when that's most relevant? When we have an oops. Because that's where leaders get this wrong. Here's what happened recently: AI is a massive boon to Ethena. It's already allowing us to scale up our compliance training creation, hyper personalize content, be even more efficient internally, and our roadmap is so exciting! I've been encouraging AI use across the company. Yes, with accompanying training and policies to ensure we have guardrails. (Side note: Ethena has great AI compliance training!) But a few weeks ago, we had an oops. Not a massive one, we caught it through our smart QA processes, and we fixed it. When we did the retro, I looked into whether this was a "good" or a "bad" mistake. A good mistake is one where the process was entirely reasonable, yet the outcome was sub-par. That's exactly what happened here – my team had taken very reasonable steps to use AI to speed up our content creation, and in this particular instance, the quality wasn't high enough. So I told everyone: 1. I'm not mad. Really! More importantly, I showed that. I didn't yell or look for blame. 2. AI is our future so we need to figure out these tricky bits and that's exactly what we're doing. 3. Keep on. My co-founder, Anne, kindly pointed out to me how impactful this was. She said leaders often say this is how they're going to act, but when the oops happens, they revert to blame. So if you find yourself dealing with an oops/hiccup/oh dear moment, try to view it as an opportunity to strengthen your culture. This doesn't mean letting people off the hook. It means separating inputs from outputs and focusing on whether the steps your team took were right.

Most companies claim they embrace failure. But walk into their Monday meetings, and watch people scramble to hide their missteps. I've seen it countless times. The same leaders who preach 'fail fast' are the first to demand explanations for every setback. Here's the uncomfortable truth:  Innovation dies in environments where people feel safer playing it safe. But there's a difference between reckless failure and strategic experimentation. Let me show you exactly how to build a culture that genuinely embraces productive failure: 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭-𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐦𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 Stop asking "Who's fault was this?" and start asking: "𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘺𝘱𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘪𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨?" "𝘞𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘢 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘧𝘢𝘪𝘭𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘶𝘴?" "𝘏𝘰𝘸 𝘤𝘢𝘯 𝘸𝘦 𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘯𝘦𝘹𝘵 𝘪𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯?" 𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞 '𝐞𝐱𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐬' Monthly meetings where teams present their failed experiments and the insights gained. The key? Leaders must go first. Share your own failures openly, specifically, and without sugar-coating. 𝐈𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 "24-𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐫𝐮𝐥𝐞" After any setback, give teams 24 hours to vent/process. Then require them to present three specific learnings and two potential next steps. This transforms failure from a dead end into a data point. Most "innovative" teams are just risk-averse businesses in disguise. They've mastered innovation theater, not actual innovation. Don't let your people think they need permission to innovate. Instead, start building systems and a culture that make innovation inevitable.

What did I do when a developer pushed a bug to production that cost us $200,000 in 30 minutes? Nothing. My team knows: no one gets fired for making a real, honest mistake. Mistakes are tuition. They're how people and companies get better. Over the years I’ve developed a simple framework to test whether a mistake is not just forgivable, but valuable: 1. Was it made in good faith? Not out of carelessness or apathy. 2. Was it a first-time mistake? First mistakes are part of the job. Repeating them is a different story. 3. Did you take ownership, learn from it, and make sure others did too? If the answer to all three is yes, then we just got smarter. Teams that fear mistakes don’t build great things, They play defense, They take the safe bet. And I don’t want that. That’s why we’ve built a culture where mistakes are surfaced, documented, shared, and used. Quarter after quarter, we improve because we carry forward the scars and wisdom of what didn’t work. Mistakes are inevitable, Learning from them is a choice.