Surviving Failure: How to Adopt the Right Perspective

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

  Career Development  

I’ve been fortunate in my career in that I have never experienced anything that I view as a failure. Sure, I’ve had plenty of failed projects, but those have always taught me something (if only what not to do), and I feel like I’ve become a better project manager as a result.

I’ve also been through my share of redundancies, and even a bankruptcy of the company I was working for. Those were harder to take the positives from because they were circumstances beyond my control, but I still grew from the experience.

However, let’s be honest: I’m able to look back at those situations more positively because of the passage of time. When my projects were falling apart, I didn’t welcome the opportunity to grow; when I was told that my position had been eliminated, I wasn’t thankful for the chance to gain a new experience. They were, at the time, failures. And I took them personally. They hurt—and sometimes they hurt badly.

Was it just time that allowed me to look at them differently? To some degree. But I also like to think that I was able to help myself to survive failure, and I think it’s important for PMs to be able to do that. There isn’t a successful PM with any significant amount of experience who hasn’t also experienced a few not-so-successful initiatives.

How a project manager deals with those can…

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