The biggest obstacle standing in your way as a leader is that most people on your team have no idea how to fail.

They have been practicing failure abstinence their whole lives, trying to get as far from failure as possible. Focusing all of their time and training on successfully completing the tasks and projects they have been assigned.

It’s impossible to lead a team that doesn’t have a clear understanding of what failure looks like, how to recognize it, what to do about it once we notice, and how to find the lessons and opportunities in every setback. That’s because our natural human instincts during a failure will only exacerbate the problem and cause added harm and damage. It’s actually very similar to our instinctual reaction to a fall.

Failure is not necessarily a stepping stone to success.

You’ve heard that saying, right? Either we succeed or we learn? Well, unfortunately, that’s not what usually happens. In most cases, teams don’t actually learn or improve after a failure. That’s because, in order to get to the coveted lessons learned, individuals have to wage war through the 6 stages of a failure:

• Outcomes for your team members:
• Understand the 6 stages of failure that all humans experience.
• Learn how to navigate the 6 stages without getting stuck in the negative ones like denial or defensiveness.
• See why most people don’t learn the right lessons after a setback, and
• Make sure that your team has the proper tools in place to become even stronger afterward.

Diana Kander and her family escaped from the Soviet Union when she was 8-years-old. By the time she was an American citizen, she had perfected her skills as a capitalist – selling flea market goods to grade school classmates at a markup.

Today, Diana draws on her experience as an entrepreneur and educator to serve as an innovation coach. In this role, she trains executives and Fortune 1000 companies to be more innovative and to inspire employees to think like entrepreneurs.