Women are terrified to allow themselves to fail. Here’s how to reframe that mindset and boost your success.
If you’ve never failed at something, how do you know when you’re succeeding?
By
ThriveGlobal
LONDON, ENGLAND – MARCH 13: Oprah Winfrey attends the European Premiere of ‘A Wrinkle In Time’ at BFI IMAX on March 13, 2018 in London, England. (Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage)
If you’ve never failed at something, how do you know when you’re succeeding? For women that question is harder to answer because they’re less likely to allow themselves to fail, according to a recent article by U.S. News & World Report called, “To Succeed, Women Must Learn to Fail Forward.”
“Research has shown that women are judged more harshly for their mistakes than men and may respond by being more risk averse,” writes Linda Kramer Jenning, the author of the article. “As a result, some women may not seize leadership opportunities and that worries those committed to achieving gender equity.”
The thing is, when you don’t fail, you don’t allow yourself to become stronger in that process, resulting in more resilience — which is a key part of being a successful leader, according to a 2018 study on nurse managers published in the U.S. National Library of Medicine. But the stakes are so much higher for women to begin with, as just 6.4 percent of Fortune 500 companies are led by women — a number that is actually on the decline, per the Pew Research Center’s 2017 data report.
Still, the benefits of failure go beyond resilience. For women, especially, being open about failure makes leaders more relatable and therefore effective. “People appreciate that you’re not perfect all the time,” Jessica Grounds, co-founder of Mine the Gap, a firm that works with companies to close their gender gaps, told U.S. News. Grounds suggests that women build a trusted team in and out of the workplace who will give constructive criticism and coach them through a failure.