Three ladies share their outlook on failure and why our thinking on this concept needs to change moving forward
Many of us are brought up to believe that success leaves little room for failure. But does our intolerance of failure imply high standards or rather an inflexibility to bounce back from inevitable setbacks? As MyBurgerLab co-founder Chin Ren Yi poignantly told Tatler, “For every success story you hear, there are another hundred to a thousand failures.”
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While we certainly shouldn’t aim for failure, we can anticipate it and appreciate the hard lessons it teaches. A big part of our mental blockade and attitude on failure stems from education, opined Tammy Tan, country manager of Red Hat Malaysia.
“Our British-inspired school system prioritises exams and scoring well, so if you don’t score well, then you’re a bad student, but that’s not true,” says Tan, who has an engineering background and is the first female country manager of the open-source software solutions provider. “You might be good at another thing and bad at exams. But being good at math doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be successful in your career.
“So education plays a part in how fearful we are of failure when we go out to work,” continues Tan. “Failure is a journey and a powerful teacher. That’s something I truly believe.”
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A working mum with over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, Tan’s drive to succeed and high-energy work approach served her well as a young leader in the workplace. However, leading a team proved a challenge that tested her ability to collaborate and work with others.
“I delivered the numbers and was customer-centric, but I was going at a pace that my team couldn’t follow,” she explains. “As a technical person in the industry, I was familiar with doing everything from sales to solutioning end-to-end. But I left my team behind and when I pushed them, they couldn’t keep the pace.
“I actually didn’t get my promotion that year, because the leadership felt I wasn’t ready. They looked at two things, one on collaboration and the other on attitude. I consider the biggest failure at that point was not just that I didn’t receive a promotion, but more that I hurt the team and I was so demanding.”