Understanding Success and Failure
One of the most difficult things for a person to do is to decide what success is. We look to identify objective criteria. When we do, we find that objective criteria never tells the whole story.
This is such a challenging problem that we look to more subjective criteria or no criteria at all to define success. To complicate the challenge, we have differences in context, relationships, structure, and environmental influences.
And yet, we somehow are able to distinguish success from failure.
Like most people, I have experience with what we commonly believe to be success and failure. My measure is not objective or subjective. I don’t care for how success or failure is defined in society. It seems too final and judgmental. It always seems to come down to a comparison with someone else.
Recently, I attended the memorial service of a high school classmate. We played football together. His life took a hard turn. He dropped out of high school and ended up in state prison for robbery. Once out, he began to help elderly people out with their yards. He did that for the rest of his life. At the service, everyone talked about how Will was a servant. No mention of his past troubles. We all agreed that he was a success in his own way.
I really don’t trust success. It seems so fleeting. Once you have it, especially it is financial success, it can easily become a burden. Success for me involves the standards to live by. I want to be clear about my purpose. I want to treat people with dignity and respect. I want just enough organizational structure to get the job done and to be free to take new opportunities that come along. If I can do this, then whatever success comes to me, I am grateful. But it isn’t what I focus on.
You would think success for me is defined by my Impact. I want to impact people and their communities. Yes, this is my focus. But it isn’t how I define success. It is much simpler.
Do I have a reason to get up in the morning and work hard every day to make a difference in the world?
If I do, then that is success to me.
Financial gain, book sales, subscriber levels, and podcast viewership are not measures of success to me. Rather they are measures of progress towards a higher goal of sustaining what I need to do to keep getting up at 4 am to sit at my computer and write and engage with people every day. If I can do that for the rest of my life, I’ll have lived a happy life, and you all will be my legacy.
How do I explain failure? Let’s say you are an entrepreneur. Your first attempt to create your business fails. But it isn’t a failure. You learned something. You apply it for the next attempt. The next failure is just a setback. You collect yourself, fix what was wrong, add what was missing, and try again. In my mind, failure is not trying. Even quitting is not failure. Sometimes we need to stop doing what is not working. I have had a lot of setbacks. But I don’t think I have ever failed because I have never quit. All along, I kept learning. I do something different. I stop doing something else. Now I am in a place with my work that I have never been. Thank you for showing this to me.
Determining success or failure is about managing expectations. Early in my career, for a short period of time, just a few months, I had a supervisor who was verbally abusive toward me. He thought I needed to be fixed. His bullying finally reached a point where he said, “You know what your problem is?” “No,” I responded. “Your problem is that you do not respect me!” I then said, “Yes. I don’t respect you because you have never earned my respect. And, I think these supervisor sessions are not benefitting you or me. I suggest we end them.” He agreed. It was the first time when confronted with my inadequacies that I learned to stand up for myself. I believe that stands as a moment of success.
Circle of Impact Quality Measures
My consulting work was built on identifying patterns of behavior. My criteria for a pattern is that it is a behavior that repeats itself and, secondly, can be identified across the spectrum of organizational types. The three patterns that I identified correspond to the three dimensions of leadership of the Circle of Impact - Ideas, Relationships, and Structure.
The three patterns are:
a lack of clarity of thought
a lack of relationships of respect and trust
the lack of understanding of what the job or the organization’s impact should be.
These three patterns of “lack” point toward the three qualities that identify a way to measure ourselves and our organizations. Establish a sustainable pattern of behavior of these three qualities, and success can be realized
Clarity
The lack of clarity begins with the ideas that we use to guide and explain who we are and what we do. Ideas are one of the three dimensions of the leadership of the Circle of Impact. Four Connecting Ideas - Values, Purpose, Vision, and Impact.
What does it mean to be clear about those four ideas?
Values are ideas that characterize or define our lives, organizations, communities, and society.
Purpose defines the focus of our actions and aspiration.
Vision is a visual conception of our work in practice and outcome.
Impact is the change that makes a difference that matters that we seek.
I call these the Four Connecting Ideas because their connection creates a dynamic of support and sustainability to any endeavor and the people involved in it.
Values are foundational. The measure of clarity is defined by our willingness to suffer to preserve a particular value or values rather than violate them through the expediency to be successful or gain some benefit.
Purpose is derived from our Values. The measure of clarity is defined by how this understanding explains Why we are engaged with the Mission that is expressed by our values. The difference between Purpose and Mission is the difference between Why and How.
Vision is a picture of our Purpose and Values in Action. The measure of clarity is found in the alignment between the structure of our Mission for achieving our Purpose.
Impact is the focal point of our Values, Purpose, and Vision. Impact is the essential measure of progress and success. It is a representation of a change that makes a difference that matters. If your results matter, then people will know, and you can replicate them for greater impact.
Relationships of Respect and Trust
The lack of relationships of respect and trust is a feature of many organizational structures. Instead, relationships are managed as if by contractual agreement. The result is the suppression of personal initiative and human creativity.
Respect is the beginning point of a healthy relationship. It is an expression of dignity and belief in the value of the other person. The product of a relationship is respect is the potential for trust to form and mutual accountability to define the organization’s relationships.
Trust is the product of Respect.
With trust, we can create teams, communities, networks, and organizations of mutual accountability.
It is the missing presence of respect and trust, in my opinion, that is the greatest deterrent to the success of an organization. The reason is that when the social environment of an organization is a shared culture of values that underbird respect and trust, openness to new ideas and possibilities grows.
This is how I came to observe that the strength of an organization is based upon “a persistent, residual culture of values that persists because it resides in the relationships of the people.”
Structures for Impact
Structure comes in three forms.
There are physical structures like of a building, a machine, or the grid structure of a town.
There are institutional structures that are commonly seen as the hierarchy of authority and responsibilities of roles and the processes of work and production.
And there are social structures that represent the culture and relationships of people in a community or organization.
These structures are the contexts of our lives. We live in and through these structures. The problem is that we are unaware of their impact on us until some aspect becomes broken, inconvenient, or toxic.
The multiplicity of these structures means that we are constantly challenged to understand their purpose and effect on our lives. Therefore, we need to constantly ask the question, what is the desired impact of this object, this process, or our team? This is the function that senior leaders should perform, for it is their responsibility to ensure that the structures have a clearly defined purpose for measuring value and impact over time.
The Circle of Impact in Practice Project
The Circle of Impact is a model, a diagram, a set of guiding principles, and a multi-dimension tool kit for people.
None of this matters as an abstract picture of leadership. To know and not practice is equivalent to my perspective on failure above. To know something of value and not use it is to fail. To try and not succeed is not failure but advancement to a new depth of understanding.
The purpose of the Circle of Impact in Practice Project, therefore, is to succeed in doing that which is necessary to be a person or an organization of impact. The product of that process is personal growth in wisdom and character for living. The creation of a book to follow up Circle of Impact is the tangible representation of the learning that we will have.
When we are done, we will have discovered how the qualities described here, not only why they matter but how they matter.
If you would like to join me in this project, go here to learn more.
A Thought 24 hours After Posting
I heard once that a work of art, whether a painting, a film, a Substack post, or a piece of music, are never complete, just abandoned. I see this in my work. I frequently make a few corrections and formatting changes days, weeks, or months later.
This is how we refine our lives. For twenty years, I have said that”Rule #1 is Everyone needs an editor.” Life is editing. The Circle of Impact in Practice Project was created to reflect this approach to living.
The final thing to say is “Don’t abandon your life to passivity and resignation. Edit it so the process of learning can last in you.”