When something goes wrong at work, most leaders immediately start thinking about themselves.

How do I protect my credibility here? If I'm too open about this, will people lose confidence in me? If I take too much blame, will it follow me?

It's an understandable instinct. But it's exactly backwards — and the research makes that pretty clear.

Amy Edmondson's early work on psychological safety produced a finding that confused even her research team at first: the highest-rated leaders among hospital nurses had higher than average rates of reported accidents on their units. More mistakes, better leader? It didn't add up — until they looked closer. Accident rates were roughly consistent across all teams. What differed was which teams felt safe enough to talk about their mistakes. Great leaders built environments where failures surfaced, got examined, and produced better systems. Poor leaders built cultures of fear where mistakes stayed hidden and nothing improved.

The implication extends to any organization doing meaningful, ambitious work. Failure isn't the exception — it's the cost of taking the risks that produce real results. So the question isn't how to avoid failure. It's what to do when it happens.

Three things work.

First, own it clearly — without vague language or soft framing. And then make an explicit distinction between the outcome and the effort. If your team executed well on a flawed strategy, say that. If you took a thoughtful risk that didn't land, name it. Because if you don't draw that line, your team will draw their own conclusions — and they'll usually decide that risk isn't worth it and start playing it safe.

Second, build a debrief habit. Post-mortems work best when they're part of a team's regular rhythm — not just a response to catastrophic failure. Research suggests that teams who conduct them consistently improve their effectiveness by around 25%. Five questions can carry the whole conversation: What did we intend? What actually happened? Why were they different? What do we do the same next time? What do we do differently? The last two questions are the ones that matter most — they point the conversation forward instead of back.

Third, reestablish direction quickly. After a failure, the most damaging thing isn't the failure itself — it's the ambiguity that follows. People start wondering whether leadership knows what's going on, whether the situation is stable, whether their effort is worth it. Leaders who handle failure well don't just process what happened. They give their teams clarity on what comes next: new priorities, clear ownership, a defined check-in, a picture of what success looks like this time.

Handled poorly, failure creates fear. Handled well, it creates resilience — and a level of trust that's hard to build any other way.

If you want to go deeper on this, I put together a video walking through each step with more detail. You can check it out here.

or article or podcast​

Here's some more resources I recommend:

Three things great teams have in common: After years of studying high-performing teams, the research keeps pointing to the same three fundamentals: shared understanding, shared trust, and shared purpose. Employees on positive teams are 2.3 times more likely to be highly engaged. That's not a rounding error—that's the difference between a team that delivers and one that barely gets by. I filmed a full keynote speech on exactly this. Research, examples, practical tools, and a few stories about group projects gone wrong that will feel uncomfortably familiar. Watch the full talk here.​

Align your team to what actually matters: Most team dysfunction isn't a people problem—it's an alignment problem. When individual incentives drift from organizational goals, everyone loses. In my LinkedIn Learning course, I walk you through how to connect your team's purpose to the broader mission, set goals that actually align with strategic priorities, and keep everything on track through regular, impactful huddles. Check it out here.​