When Matthew Egan FCA was overlooked for partnership at PwC at a relatively young age, back in 2012, he saw it as a greater slight than was likely intended. After all, he was only 31 years old, it was the first time he had attempted to make partner and, he now realises he still had much to learn.

“I got so frustrated that they had told me no,” Egan, author of The Failure Advantage: Why Setbacks Are Your Secret Weapon for Success, recalls. “I took that as final. It was a classic case of fear of failure. I was so embarrassed and it was part of the reason I left the firm.

“But if I now look back, if I had waited one year and learned what I needed to learn, I probably would have been successful.”

Having gone on to become head of finance operations at Vodafone Group in the UK, and now transformation director and client partner – industry solutions at Microsoft, the decision didn’t negatively affect Egan’s career. But, over the years, he increasingly realised how a fear of failure influences decisions and behaviours.

Most interestingly, fear of failure is not something we’re born with, he says. Research has revealed that we are born with only two fears: the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling. Everything else is learned.

“From the moment we’re old enough to understand success and failure, we’re conditioned to see failure as something shameful,” says Egan.

“Schools reward the right answers. Businesses celebrate winners. Social media only exacerbates that. We see snippets of success of people’s lives and draw the conclusion that there is no failure in their life. The irony is that almost everything valuable we learn in life comes from failure.”

“The organisations and individuals that improve fastest are the ones that treat failure as information and take action on it, so they’re constantly learning.”

Failure-related behaviours

Why is it important to recognise and change behaviours brought on by a fear of failure? Because they are typically negative and unproductive behaviours, Egan says. Because they are about avoidance. And because their outcome is a lack of improvement, innovation and learning.

“Failure often disguises itself as positive behaviours,” he says. “These are behaviours like perfectionism. If you’ve got a perfectionistic tendency, often behind that is the fact that you’re fearful of getting it wrong.”

Fear of failure could reveal itself in over-preparation, too. This leads to a lack of real productivity – spending several hours preparing for a 15-minute meeting, for example.

“Procrastination is another one,” Egan says. “If you’re a big procrastinator, often sitting behind that is fear. ‘If I take that action, then I’ll expose myself to the potential that it could go wrong’.

“Even constantly being busy is one of these behaviours. A lot of people fill the void, or avoid failure, by being constantly busy.”

Then, of course, there is also the more common problem of making no real effort in the first place. The message a person is broadcasting in this case is that they made little effort intentionally because they never intended to succeed, therefore they can’t be blamed for failing.

It’s very important to recognise these signals and to see the damage they are doing on a personal and organisational level.

“The organisations and individuals that improve fastest are the ones that treat failure as information and take action on it, so they’re constantly learning,” Egan says.

Of course, it’s also vital for organisations to analyse how they approach failure. Do they make their people fear failure, or do they reward and celebrate the right type of experimentation?

Using failure to fuel success

Consider the stories of some of history’s greatest entrepreneurs, businesspeople and achievers, Egan says.

Steve Jobs was forced out of his own business, and experienced repeated business setbacks and failures before returning and revolutionising the world of technology. Even products such as the iPhone and iPod experiences failures and redesigns throughout the years.

Then there’s the story of KFC’s Harland David Sanders (aka Colonel Sanders), who was 62 years old when the first KFC franchise opened. Prior to that he’d been a steam engine stoker, an insurance salesman, pumping fuel at a petrol station and had owned a roadside restaurant.

How do we become more like those who see risk as an asset and don’t fear a potentially negative outcome?

Egan suggests a four-part framework.

1. Recognition of fear of failure

This first part of the process, Egan says, is simply about acceptance and awareness. This matters because fear of failure can disguise itself as diligence or professionalism, but ultimately leads to a lack of growth, learning and improvement.

2. Challenge the internal narrative

“Where the first point is just to recognise that you fear failure, the second is about choosing a better story, so you can reframe it,” Egan says.

Professionals can sometimes make the mistake of attaching a particular failure to their identity, for example, rather than to the specific event.

“Maybe something goes wrong during a project,” he explains. “But rather than saying, ‘I am a failure’ or ‘I failed at that’, actually it was the project that failed, not you. That’s fine. So, what did you learn from it? Distance yourself and make it a learning experience.”

That shift in perspective then introduces space for the next stage of the process, the concept of treating setbacks as valuable feedback, rather than as negative verdicts.

3. Value the feedback

Failure delivers powerful lessons. From the Wright brothers as they chased their dream of building a flying vehicle to explosions during launches or landings of Space X rockets, failure is an expected and constructive part of the process.

“What feedback am I getting from this failure?” Egan says. “What can I take out of this to use as something constructive? Focus on what you can control by extracting as much feedback and information as possible.”

Only then, he says, is it time to act.

4. Do something small

Instead of possibly becoming trapped in the pursuit of perfection, delaying decisions or endlessly refining work in the hope of avoiding mistakes, what is needed is to take some sort of action, advises Egan.

“I call it progress over perfection,” he says, “But you could really dumb it down by saying, ‘Do something’.

“In other words, start before you’re ready. Take action, because I think action is a great way to get yourself away from the thinking and into the doing. Rather than waiting until every uncertainty has been removed, just take the smallest action possible. Now, you’re moving forward again.”

The goal here, Egan says, is not a lowering of standards or an acceptance of poor performance or lower productivity. Instead, it is thoughtful experimentation, after taking on the learnings from past failures.

“Something I don’t want to indicate is that failure is just acceptable because then we’re risking losing our standards,” he says.

Instead, the final part of the framework involves a balance of action and discipline. It requires an acceptance that setbacks are inevitable during the pursuit of excellence.

“Failure will continue to exist along the way to success,” he says.

The objective is not to make more mistakes. It is instead to become better at recognising them, learning from them and moving forward before fear has a chance to delay the next decision.

How to build teams unafraid to fail

When failure is treated as a source of valuable information, organisations find a new competitive advantage.

“Most of the time, people spend time explaining, justifying, ignoring or rationalising,’ Egan says. “But if an organisation builds it into their culture to value failure, they’re constantly learning.”

So, how does a company build this into its behaviour? How do managers encourage the right level of failure?

“One of the most misunderstood concepts in leadership is that you need to lead from the front and that you need to demonstrate that you’re perfect,” he says. “Actually, I think the opposite is true. Being vulnerable and sharing your own failures is perhaps the most important leadership trait.”

Managers should reward curiosity, honesty and experimentation to create an environment of psychological safety. That means “intelligent experimentation” is allowed and encouraged no matter the outcome, Egan says.

“It’s so that people can experiment in a controlled fashion, not recklessly and not carelessly,” he says. “They know they won’t be punished or shamed for less-than-perfect outcomes.”

Shame is an important factor to remove from the outcome of failure, Egan says. Imagine a child on a football field who is yelled at angrily by their coach for missing a shot at goal.

“That child becomes attached to the shame associated with being told off by the coach,” he says. “That’s what you begin to associate with failure, that feeling of shame, as opposed to being able to think about what actually went wrong and what you can learn from it and do better next time.

“Failure really can be a positive thing. But in the wrong environment, all you remember out of the experience is the emotional pain of being told off or being made to feel ashamed for getting something wrong. You associate the experience not with the valuable learning but instead with the painful emotional outcome.”

For organisations, he says, the real cost of fear of failure is the opportunities that never materialise because people become too afraid to try. Teams in such businesses learn more slowly, adapt less readily and, in an environment of change, react with caution instead of innovation.

However, businesses and individuals that encourage thoughtful risk taking solve problems sooner, engage their staff, innovate with confidence and respond more effectively to disruption.

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Take away

The CA Library offers Matthew Egan’s 2025 ebook, The Failure Advantage: Why Setbacks Are Your Secret Weapon for Success.

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