Failing Forward: Why Good Leaders Stall in the Wrong Seat
Most of the leaders I work with are competent people in a season where competence stopped being enough. If that sounds like you, I want to offer a different way to read what's happening.
What failing forward means when you lead
I define failure as "a moment when an outcome produced learning before the desired result." Everyone Fails. Winners Fail4ward.
Failing forward means you treat the miss as information you can use. You ask what the outcome is trying to teach you before you decide what it says about you. That sounds simple, but under pressure, with a team watching and a boss asking questions, it's one of the hardest things a leader can do. I'll share a little secret: even the company owner and CEO experiences these heavy, pressure-derived emotions.
I've had to rebuild my standards from the ground up, personally and professionally. Fail4ward came out of the years that followed me having to do so.
What I learned in that difficult season is that the most useful information in a failure is often about fit. The real question is whether your seat is asking you to lead in a way that works against how you're built.
Hear me go deeper on failing forward on the Deep Discussion podcast.
Why good leaders underperform in the wrong seat
You can be misaligned in more than one way such that you're wandering in multiple directions. Your strengths can point one way, your role another, and your team a third. When that happens, a lot of your energy goes into friction instead of results. You may have heard really prominent figures refer to this as allowing "noise instead of signal" to be your guiding light.
From the outside it looks like a performance problem, but from the inside it feels worse. You work longer, second-guess calls you used to make without thinking and the result ends up being you slowly starting to believe the story that the problem is you.
That story is a lie. Your failures don't define you, and a stalled season doesn't erase the track record that got you promoted. You can't fix a fit problem by trying harder at the wrong thing and you can't see it clearly by staring solely at your effort. If the stall has shaken your confidence, I wrote about rebuilding confidence after a setback too.
Left alone, the friction keeps eating your energy, and your team pays for it along with you. They get a leader who's stretched thin and second-guessing everything when they need clear calls. If you're starting to see the same pattern in the people who report to you, read about the hidden drain behind preventable turnover.
Measuring fit beats guessing
Most leaders get read by gut feel, a review cycle, or a personality label. Most assessments label people and stop, and a label doesn't tell you what to change on Monday.
That's why I use the tru® platform. tru® is a whole-person intelligence tool that reveals what it calls your Achievement DNA, "the unique combination of internal drivers, values, strengths, and needs that predict peak performance." It rests on 40 years of psychological science, and I completed the tru® Coach Certification Program through BreakThrough Performance Systems in March 2026. Here's what you walk away with:
a truSelf Portrait, which is a clear picture of who you are at your best
your Achievement DNA, meaning your own performance drivers
your Ideal Environment
My Path Forward, a development plan built on your actual DNA instead of a generic template
The portrait comes from your Peak Experiences, which are defined as the moments when you accomplished something meaningful and had high energy doing it. You enter at least three so the picture is clear. That matters, because the read starts from times you were winning, and the season you're stuck in doesn't get to set the terms without first acknowledging you from some of your best seasons of life. This is where the Fail4ward saying comes in handy: "Everyone Fails. Winners Fail4ward." Remembering your wins while in a stuck season reminds you that you're a winner.
What you can do about it
You can start on your own today. Write down a few moments in your working life when you did your best work and had the most energy at the same time. Then look at your calendar for this week and ask how much of it looks like those moments. If the answer is very little, you've learned something useful, and nobody had to fail you in a review for you to learn it.
If you want to go further, this is how I run Achievement DNA Mapping, my coaching approach for finding where a leader is misaligned from their strengths, their role and their team. It's part of how I work with leaders in executive coaching.
Map. You take the tru® assessment. It surfaces your strengths profile, your role fit and your blind spots. Before you take it, we run a structured onboarding session so you know what you're looking for.
Coach. After the assessment, we sit down and go through what it revealed using the Co-Active Coaching Model: where your strengths are, where your role is pulling against them, and what to change first. We set the length and pace of our sessions around what your results show.
Measure. After 30 days, you take the survey again, and you see the before and the after side by side. Measuring at both ends means the result shows up as a number rather than an impression. You keep the Path Forward plan.
Picture your week once the fit is right. The right fit is clearer to see when more of your calendar looks like those best-work moments, like when you make calls without second-guessing them, and your team gets a leader with energy left over for them. That's what becomes possible when your seat stops pulling against how you're built.
You weren't meant to carry it alone
The leaders carrying the most shouldn't be the ones getting the least support. There's a line I come back to with every leader I sit across from: "Just because the responsibility is on your shoulders [as the owner, the operator, the team leader] doesn't mean the weight was meant to be carried alone."
A stalled season is telling you something about fit. Get it measured, and read it with someone who's been there.
If you want to talk through where you might be misaligned, set up a time with me. If you'd rather start by reading, the playbook shows how misalignment drains strong people and what to ask about it this week.
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