How to rebuild your team's confidence after a big failure
Every leader faces it at some point – the project that should have been a success, but flopped. Despite months of hard work, the outcome doesn’t land. For teams, the fallout can be deflating especially when the team sacrificed time, energy and momentum to make it happen.
If you’re a leader trying to help your team recover after a big disappointment, it can feel like you’ve lost the sense of purpose that once fuelled your work together. There’s a black hole where the energy used to be, and there’s often a big dose of personal guilt and frustration layered on top.
Here’s how to build your team’s confidence and get them back on track.
Acknowledge the failure
You’ve all worked extremely hard on something and it’s not worked out. Where you once had a project, a passion, a purpose - you now have…a black hole.
And that’s what you need to tackle: the black hole. How can you rejuvenate your team by giving them something else they care about? Is it restoring their faith in the original product? Is it creating a new target? Is it offering a new training programme which they gain something meaningful from at the end? Is it bringing them nose-to-nose with end users of the main product who can remind them how important the product is to them in completing their work and thus reassure them that their work really matters? It might be one of these, it might be a combination, but what you are looking for is a way of revitalising the sense of purpose, progress and/or meaning that your team has traditionally derived from their work.
Deal with your own feelings
I realise that, as a leader, if your team are exposed to problems or disappointment, you may wish that you had protected them better. But often with these kind of things, the whole business experiences the same shock. You can’t blame yourself for either the failure or for not protecting your team. Those feelings are helpful in the sense that they show you and your team that you really care about them and have good emotional intelligence (which will likely further improve your reputation as a leader). However, it’s also time to move on because the energy you’re using up on feeling bad is energy you can’t dedicate to creating momentum in your team. So take a breath, let it go, and make a start on rebuilding your team’s enthusiasm, one little bit at a time.
3 resources to help
A great podcast episode from HBR on what to do in this frustratingly common situation: How to motivate an unmotivated team
Why it’s good to feel guilt as a leader: it’ll make you a better leader and more productive according to research
How to rebuild your confidence after failure: great tips from a Ted Ideas article, including how to develop a genuinely supportive network
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