Why Great Leaders Learn Through Failure

By Helen Wada with Dr. Melisa Buie

Failure, Reflection, and Human Performance. Most of us have organised our entire professional lives around not failing. What if that is the very thing holding us back?

In the latest episode of Human Wise, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Melisa Buie, a problem-solving expert, author, and operational excellence specialist joining us from Connecticut. Melisa grew up on a farm in Alabama and has built a career that spans mathematics, engineering, nuclear physics, and organisational leadership. She is the author of Faceplant: Free Yourself from Failure’s Funk, a bestselling exploration of the emotions that failure triggers and the practical tools we can use to move through them, and Problem Solving for New Engineers: What Every Engineering Manager Wants You to Know. Through her work in lean manufacturing and continuous improvement, she has spent decades asking the question that sits at the heart of Human Wise: how do brilliant technical experts lead, connect, and grow with confidence?

What I love about Melisa’s work is that it brings rigorous scientific thinking to deeply human territory. Failure, shame, avoidance, reflection, and the courage to try again are not soft concepts in her world. They are the operating system of high performance. Here are the key insights from our conversation:

We Have Organised Our Lives Around Not Failing

When I asked Melisa what being human at work means to her, she went straight to the thing most of us spend enormous energy pretending does not exist: the terror of failure. Not the concept of failure, but the visceral, physical experience of it. The shame that follows a project that went wrong. The fear of being seen as incompetent. The guilt about a decision that affected someone on your team. These are not weaknesses to be managed. They are profoundly human experiences that walk into every meeting room with us, whether we acknowledge them or not.

Melisa: “Most of us have organised our entire lives, professional and personal, around not failing. Rather than building our lives around possibility, we are building our lives around avoidance. Being human at work is about having the courage and the tools to really interrupt that autopilot and choose a completely different response.”

That image of autopilot is one that lands powerfully for me. When the amygdala takes over under stress or threat, rational thinking shuts down and we default to pre-programmed responses: defensiveness, avoidance, over-control. We are no longer actively leading. We are simply reacting. Melisa’s life work is about helping people interrupt that pattern, and it begins with naming what is actually happening.

Fear of Failure Is Costing Us Commercially

Melisa’s insight on autopilot and avoidance connected immediately to something I see every day in the commercial work I do with professional services firms. Some of the most talented and capable people I have worked with, accountants, lawyers, engineers, executive coaches, are held back not by a lack of skill but by a deeply entrenched fear of getting it wrong. That fear shows up in the hesitation before a new client conversation, the reluctance to propose a bold idea, the constant second-guessing that drains energy that could be going into genuine connection and growth.

Helen: “What I see with experienced individuals that I work with is that fear of failure. We worry that it is not going to work, and therefore the biggest, the worst negotiator in the room is often ourselves. When the pressure is off, that is when people thrive. And I see that on a daily basis with individuals that I work with, whether that is accountants, lawyers, engineers, executive coaches. All brilliant at what they do, but with that fear of failure around creating their own opportunities.”

Melisa built on this directly. When we are locked in avoidance mode, we lose access to the very thing that makes us most effective: our proactive, curious, human capacity to choose how we respond. The path back is not more process or more technique. It is the internal work of learning to sit with discomfort long enough to learn from it.

Why Reflection Is So Hard, and Why It Matters So Much

Melisa introduced her FREE framework: Focus, Reflect, Explore, and Engage, developed from lean manufacturing principles and the Japanese concept of hansei, which translates as self-reflection for improvement. The reflect step, she argues, is the most powerful and the most consistently skipped. Research has even found that people will choose mild physical discomfort over spending unstructured time with their own thoughts. We have a million ways to distract ourselves, and most of us use all of them.

She identified three reasons why reflection is so hard. First, we live in cultures that value action over contemplation, so sitting and thinking feels unproductive. Second, reflection forces us to engage with heavy emotions like shame, fear, and regret that the brain is literally wired to avoid. And third, genuine reflection threatens the carefully constructed self-image we present to the world.

Melisa: “Reflection actually threatens the fortress that we are trying to build. We build a self-image that we display for the world, and the danger is when we start believing that about ourselves and then avoid reflecting because reflection challenges it. When we try to ignore our feelings rather than acknowledge what is going on for us, it is like burying a time bomb.”

The time bomb image comes from Melisa’s own experience. When her father was killed in an automobile accident early in her career, she went back to work 3,000 miles away and buried all of it. A year later, she was a wreck. Everything she had avoided had compounded quietly until it detonated. The lesson she carries into every coaching engagement is the same: the feelings come in whether you invite them or not. You might as well acknowledge them and bring your full self, because that is what was hired.

Reflection Is a Commercial Skill, Not Just a Personal One

One of the most energising parts of our conversation was when Melisa and I connected the practice of reflection directly to the commercial environment. For Melisa, the best tool for reflection is writing. Pen to paper, no rules about spelling or grammar, no agenda, just dumping what is in your head onto the page and giving it away. She credits James Pennebaker’s work on expressive writing and Alison Jones’s work on exploratory writing as having fundamentally changed how she approaches her days.

Melisa: “I get to just dump what is in my head, what I am feeling, what I am thinking. It is like giving it away to the paper, and it gives me perspective on whatever topic it is that I am thinking about.”

I shared the approach I take in the programmes we run: writing the question you are holding at the top of the page first, then letting the pen flow without editing or judgement. The science is clear that the cognitive link between hand and paper produces something different from typing. And the freedom of knowing it does not have to go anywhere, that it can be ripped up and thrown away, often unlocks the honesty that is otherwise impossible to access in a professional setting.

Helen: “The higher up in an organisation that you go, the less you have others around you to learn from. And so the power of self-reflection becomes critically important as you progress your leadership career. Write the question down first. Then try to answer it. If you do not know what to write, say that, and just let it emerge. Something will come up, and it is quite powerful in terms of self-awareness.”

Creating Cultures Where It Is Safe to Experiment

When I asked Melisa what leaders inside large organisations can do to release the fear of failure and encourage genuine experimentation, she was practical and direct. The starting point is psychological safety: creating the conditions in which people know that a failed experiment will be treated as a learning experience rather than a career limiting event. And the most effective way to build that culture is to start very small.

Melisa: “The more we try small things, the better. If I try a small experiment and it does not work, I will know within 24 hours and I can adjust. Bringing that curiosity and really engaging with it, rather than, oh, I screwed up, it is, oh, that did not work, so let me try something else. The more we practise that type of activity, the more we build that culture where it is safe to experiment.”

She also introduced a tool I am now taking directly into my own coaching work: the pre-mortem. Before launching a new initiative or entering a high-stakes conversation, you imagine it has already failed and ask what went wrong. Working backwards from a hypothetical failure surfaces the risks that optimism or group-think would otherwise obscure, and allows you to address them before they materialise. What feels like an exercise in pessimism is, in practice, a powerful act of leadership intelligence.

Melisa’s Top Tip and Reflection Question

As we drew to a close, I asked Melisa for one top tip and one question for listeners to sit with. I had already given my own challenge to the audience: think of something you have been holding back from trying, and just go and try it. Melisa’s advice was a natural complement to that.

Melisa: “Just jump in and start practising. Practise reflection, practise experimentation, practise being curious. The feelings around failure are not going to go away. They may get easier to deal with the more we practise, but it is not ever going to be easy when we screw up. The more we spend time in reflection and bring that curiosity, the better we become at being proactive rather than reactive.”

And for the reflection question, she offered something that I think is one of the most practically useful pre-action questions I have heard:

Melisa: “What if this does not work? Explore that. How might I feel? What might the customer say? What might my team say? And then ask yourself, how might I adjust if that is what happens? It is a really great way to get yourself into the right headspace to engage in a new way.”

That question, taken seriously before a difficult conversation, a new pitch, or an unfamiliar challenge, is the pre-mortem applied at the individual level. It is the antidote to the autopilot Melisa described at the start of our conversation: not eliminating risk, but choosing consciously how to meet it.

Final Thoughts

This conversation with Melisa Buie is a timely and practical reminder that the fear of failure is not a character flaw. As humans, we all fear failure. What separates the leaders who grow from those who plateau is not the absence of that fear, but the willingness to reflect on it, learn from it, and try again. As I said to Melisa at the end of our conversation, I genuinely hope she fails a lot. Because that means she is trying a lot of things, and that is exactly the mindset that every organisation, team, and individual needs right now.

For a deeper dive into our conversation, listen to the full podcast episode with Dr. Melisa Buie here, or reach out to me on LinkedIn.

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Connect with Dr. Melisa Buie on LinkedIn and find Faceplant: Free Yourself from Failure’s Funk and Problem Solving for New Engineers on Amazon and through all major book retailers. Human Wise releases new episodes weekly and is available on all major podcast platforms.