Project HEADWAY: Confronting Failure

  Lessons Learned   Strategy  

Failure is hard. We avoid it, we don’t like to talk about it, and we would prefer it didn’t happen.

Every project manager must confront failure at some point in their career. Projects are risk undertakings at best, and not everyone will be successful.

The challenge is that in many organizational cultures, failure has consequences: someone needs to be blamed. That is a hard burden at the best of times, and very often, the project manager is the target.

Managing, processing, and dealing with failure is an important skill, but one that we don’t talk about very often. Failure is more common than we acknowledge, and yet the tendency is to brush it under the carpet and pretend it didn’t happen.

That’s all well and good, until you are the project manager who gets saddled with failure—deserved or not—and carries that load. What do you do then? How you respond to project failures, how you take accountability, and what you learn as a result is vital for career success.

For any project manager who has experienced a failure—or fears that they might in the future—this is a webinar that you will want to attend.

Failure is hard. We avoid it, we don’t like to talk about it, and we would prefer it didn’t happen. Every project manager must confront failure at some point in their career. Projects are risk undertakings at best, and not everyone will be successful. The challenge is that in many organizational cultures, failure has consequences: someone needs to be blamed. That is a hard burden at the best of times, and very often, the project manager is the target.