We’ve all been there, the greatest embarrassments of our careers.

The hard part is being really honest with yourself, as you probably saw the failure coming and just hoped that you’d be able to find your away around it.

Jim Collins articulated this idea well in Good to Great:

The Stockdale Paradox is a concept, along with its companion concept Confront the Brutal Facts, developed in the book Good to Great. Productive change begins when you confront the brutal facts. Every good-to-great company embraced what we came to call the “Stockdale Paradox”: you must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

I’ve found this to be one of the toughest parts of leadership. You want to have hope and optimism, you want to convey enthusiasm to your team, yet you have to deal with what reality is handing you.

  • Your customers are telling you that they just don’t like your product.
  • The regulators have stepped in and removed all possibility for this being a sustainable venture.
  • Your worst-case-scenario competitor arrived on the scene and is taking over your market.

As a leader, you have a number of tools at your disposal which can save you from the intolerable stress.

You can go off to the mountaintop to think through alternatives and even question some of your foundation assumptions.

You can form a “tiger team” of the brightest minds in your organization who will think outside your current plans and perhaps come up with creative alternatives.

You can admit defeat, put your people to other tasks and move on to the next challenge.

You can bring in a new leader, even replacing yourself, who will shake things up by changing all the assumptions.

During my career, I’ve had opportunities to do each of these things. Various levels of pain were involved, but it was the right thing to do at the time.

You might notice that I didn’t list that you can hire a consultant to study the situation with an outside perspective. The reason is because I’ve never actually seen this work successfully, although I imagine it must have worked someplace. The problem is that this rarely gives you ownership of the result. Instead, it’s a fat (and expensive!) binder which immediately goes up on the shelf.

No, you’re going to have to own your path through this problem. You’ll learn a whole lot about yourself and your organization, but there may be pain involved.