The Hindu Business Line : From failure to success

Much of life is beyond our control. Disappointments are part and parcel of a corporate career. Upcoming managers, therefore, must expect that they will confront different kinds of adversities during their professional life.

Just as organisational success is not uncommon, so also is organisational failure. Organisations are like teams in a football competition: all cannot win nor can all lose. Like two sides of the same coin, success and failure go together.

Fame and wealth do not insulate people from their fate. There is no cruise control for managers to coast on the momentum of their moments of triumph. The nature and timing of setbacks are almost always awkward and inconvenient. The costs and consequences may include, inter alia, a derailed career, personal humiliation, financial crisis, ill-health, and shattered dreams and aspirations.

Their success alone must not be a criterion to evaluate managers. Rather, they must be judged by how they respond, when fate intervenes and destroys the joy of their hard-earned achievements. The quality of resilience and redemption is critical in the life and career of managers. Visionary managers possess the powerful skill for candid self-assessment of their strengths and weaknesses; and an infinite capacity to reframe past setbacks into future successes.

No adversity is an impediment in the pathway of a manager's greatness. In fact, the subsequent resilienceis a positive influence in character formation of rare calibre. For such managers there is no such thing as a "failure", but only a wrong expectation. They firmly believe that any failure is only a stepping-stone to success.

It is after going through such an experience that people seem to recognise, what it is that they must truly value; that people are able to identify, whom they can really trust. It is during such an experience that people display and demonstrate their latent and hitherto unknown dimensions of character and personality.

It is during such difficult times that managers must step back, take a deep breath, and embrace the crisis as an opportunity to prove their mettle. Nevertheless, they will do well to appreciate that such a mission is seldom accomplished all alone, but with the help and efforts of their team members: All for one, and one for all.

R. Devarajan

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