Think about this: we have inspirational stories—both real and imaginary—of people who went from extreme poverty to mega wealth, from alarming sickness to obsessive health freaks, and from ignorance to wisdom. However, we don’t even bother making up stories of bosses who went from terrible to amazing. If we did, they would probably be classified as science fiction. In contrast, and as earlier chapters have demonstrated, there is no shortage of real-life examples for leaders who were great until they deteriorated. The pathway from good to bad seems much easier than the one going from bad to good.

Kolditz wrote his 2007 book, In Extremis Leadership, with a different goal in mind than that of most case studies about leadership in crisis. As he has said, most of the time as a leadership expert, ‘you’re studying people in ordinary companies who never really wanted to be in a crisis but found themselves there and either fixed it or didn’t. The problem with that is you’re essentially studying crisis amateurs, and what I wanted to do was study crisis professionals—people who are in dangerous places all the time, and look at their techniques, their approaches to leadership, how they were different.

Sydney Finkelstein, a Dartmouth professor who studied major failures at over fifty companies, found that those higher in the management hierarchy were more likely to blame factors other than themselves compared to those with less power. Oddly, those with the most power seem to feel they have the least control. So much for the “buck stops here” thinking popularized by U.S. president Harry Truman.

For example, meeting with senior executives in a large financial services firm in April

2020, I listened as they explained that the current business environment made failure temporarily “off-limits.” Understandably concerned about an economic climate increasingly challenged by a global pandemic, these business leaders wanted everything to go as well as possible. Generally speaking, they were sincere in their desire to learn from failure. But enthusiasm about failing was acceptable when times were good, they told me; now that the future looked uncertain, pursuing unerring success was more imperative than ever. These smart, well-intentioned people needed to rethink failure. First, they needed to appreciate the context. The need for fast learning from failure is most critical in times of uncertainty and upheaval, in part because failures are more likely! Second, while encouraging people to minimize basic and complex failures may help them focus, welcoming intelligent failures remains essential to progress in any industry. Third, they needed to recognize that the most likely outcome of their prohibition on failure wasn’t perfection but rather not hearing about the failures that do occur. When people don’t speak up about small failures—say, an accounting error—these can spiral into larger failures, such as massive banking losses.

Now consider what happens when senior executives, or parents, for that matter, state unequivocally that failure is off-limits, that only good results are acceptable. Failures don’t stop. They simply go underground. Unwittingly, the financial services executives I spoke with were at risk of inhibiting the transmission of bad news. That wasn’t their goal. Their goal was to encourage excellence. But it’s human nature to hide the truth when it’s clear that sharing it will bring punishment—or even just disapproval. Our fear of rejection presents the third barrier to practicing the science of failing well.