What the Return on Failure Actually Requires of Leaders

Last week the Center for Creative Leadership's research named a gap that most senior leaders and organizations recognize but rarely address directly. Organizations are developing leaders for individual challenges — the visible, actionable ones they can name and measure. What is consistently underrepresented are the deeper capabilities required when those challenges arrive simultaneously, compound one another, and resist easy resolution.

This week John C. Maxwell names one of those deeper capabilities with precision. In his newest book — How to Get a Return on Failure: Fail Smarter — Return Stronger — Maxwell makes an argument that every leader navigating complexity needs to hear: failure and success are not opposites. They belong together. The most effective leaders are not those who avoid failure. They are those who extract return from it — who treat every miss as data, every setback as a development opportunity, and every difficult chapter as the raw material for what comes next.

Understanding, Maxwell argues, is the difference between repeating failure and learning from it.

That distinction is not motivational. It is operational. And for leaders navigating transitions and complex change, it is one of the most consequential capabilities they can develop.

Why Transitions Surface This Capability Most

Leadership transitions are the moments that most honestly reveal a leader's relationship with failure. A newly appointed executive who makes an early misjudgment — about a stakeholder, a team dynamic, a strategic priority — will either extract the return from that miss or allow it to compound into a pattern that undermines the transition before it has fully begun.

A leader navigating restructuring who underestimates the human complexity of the change — who moves too fast, communicates too little, or hands off the people strategy before the transition is complete — faces a choice at the moment the gap becomes visible. Extract the return or repeat the pattern.

A high-potential leader stepping into expanded scope who discovers that the approach that produced success in the previous role is no longer serving the demands of the new one — that moment of recognition is a miss. What the leader does with it determines whether it becomes a lesson or a limitation.

In each of these contexts the capability Maxwell is describing is not optional. It is the mechanism through which leadership development actually happens in the field — in real roles, under real pressure, with real consequences.

What Getting a Return on Failure Requires

Maxwell identifies what this capability demands of a leader. The willingness to look honestly at what did not work and why. The discipline to separate the miss from the identity — to understand that failing at something is not the same as being a failure. The intentionality to extract the specific insight that the miss contains and apply it forward.

These are not soft skills. They are the hardest disciplines in leadership — because they require a leader to sit with discomfort long enough to extract its value rather than moving past it as quickly as possible.

What I observe consistently in my work with senior leaders through transitions and complex change is that the leaders who develop most durably are not those who experience the fewest setbacks. They are those who have developed the most sophisticated relationship with the setbacks they do experience. They know how to look at a miss honestly. They know how to extract the return. And they know how to move forward with greater clarity and conviction than they had before the miss occurred.

That is the capability the CCL research identified as consistently underinvested in. And it is the capability Maxwell's book is built to develop.

The Space Where This Work Happens

The return on failure is not developed in isolation. It requires reflection — which is difficult to sustain alone under the pressure of a demanding role. It requires honest conversation — which is difficult to have without a trusted space where experience is taken seriously and no lesson is wasted. And it requires community — peers who are doing the same interior work, who understand the terrain, and who can offer the perspective that proximity to the challenge makes difficult to access alone.

This is the work The HR Savant is built for — with the specific leader navigating specific complexity, extracting the return that every difficult chapter contains.

Maxwell's book is many things — rigorous, practical, and deeply honest about what navigating failure actually demands. But at its most essential it is a reminder. Simple and positive. One that leaders navigating their most demanding chapters often forget when the pressure is highest and the path forward is least visible.

Keep moving. Keep adjusting. Keep believing.

Of the three, believing is the one that matters most. Not because movement and adjustment are unimportant — they are essential. But because without the belief that the difficulty contains something worth extracting, neither movement nor adjustment produces the return that failure is capable of generating. Mindset is not a supplement to the work. It is the foundation on which all of it rests.

If you are navigating that complexity — or preparing someone who is — the conversation is worth having.

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