- Just ahead on WTVP 50 years of Leadership Series we're talking about the dirty little 'F' word, failure and what leadership lessons come from it.

Tonight's critical conversation brings discussion from three more great central Illinois leaders and it all starts right now.

(gentle music) - Good evening, thanks so much for joining us for part two in our Leadership Series I'm Amy Burkett.

Early in my career, I could barely say the dirty little 'F' word failure.

I was terrified of it, but I quickly learned failure is often unavoidable, and can be a critical step towards success.

So let's meet our panelists right now where we will learn a lot more about that dirty little 'F'word.

We'll begin with reverend Marvin Hightower, he's the president of the NAACP of the Peoria and pastor of Liberty church in Peoria, reverend Hightower talk to us, you know, how have you bonded with that dirty little 'F' word over the years?

- Well, from this view, people have two things, they either have a fear of success or a fear of failure.

And what's been driving me is failing, and I heard it said this way, fail forward.

So I use it as a springboard to move me on to the next thing that I'm trying to achieve.

Now, it's not easy, and there was something that I had to learn, but as a young boy, failure was never something that I used as a crutch, it was something to use as a springboard.

- I love it, next up, Angela Moriarty, she is vice president of human resources at Advanced Correctional Healthcare.

And she is actually on the board of WTVP talk to us about your experience with the dirty 'F' word.

- My experience with the dirty 'F' word being young and taking on leadership role early on I had to find the right people to surround myself with.

I knew I was going to be a human, I wasn't going to be perfect, and I needed to know where my safety net was.

Because when you make that mistake, when you make that first step out, you need to find people that will surround you and lift you back up again.

And so, as I've grown other leaders in the organization I've tried to do the same thing.

You bring them in, you tell them here is your trainers but here's your support system.

So that moment that you feel you're about to fail let us help you because it's in everyone's best interest.

- Absolutely, thank you so much.

Our final panelist this evening is Jim Shaw.

He's the owner of Shaw Lincoln Volvo Mazda.

Jim, talk to us about your failure experience and how you bonded with it.

- Well, I bonded very well with it after fortunate ration in the car business, and it kinda entitlement was a big part of my life, and especially for the first 10 years being in my industry I just thought I was naturally good at it.

And it couldn't have been further from the truth.

I was not a good manager, not a good dealer, and it was finally that epiphany, that time of accepting failure and accepting the core of, you know what, I'm really not good at this.

Those are the times that you ask questions and you seek the truth and you go to people, in my case, people that I managed employees of ours and I started asking them questions, what do you do?

How do you succeed?

What am I doing wrong?

And it's that just that core of reality, a little bit of vulnerability, and when you seek the truth, you find out then how to lead, so that's how I did it.

- Great information, so now we're gonna get personal, my friends, so I wanna hear your biggest failure and what that experience is, and what was the lesson that you learned from it?

Let's begin with Angela.

- This is huge, I was in FMLA with human resources, so that's a leave act and there are certain regulations and certain things that an organization can do.

This is one of the stories that I tell all of the new hires not only in the HR department, but kind of as a whole when it comes to failure.

We had a set practice the way that we were to do things.

And once a leave runs out, we would make, you know move on to that next step.

There was a case that I had where I disagreed with separating an employee out.

I thought that this employee had done the right thing.

Been really good to the organization and had some really horrible, horrible things against them right now just personally and medically going on.

But the practice was what you need to do right now is you need to go and separate this person out.

So I went and completed it felt horrible, went straight into the CEO and said, oh my gosh this is what I have just done.

And I feel horrible, and his response was then why did you do it?

And he said, make it right, so I turned around, went back, apologized up and down as much as I could to say, I just did this, and this is wrong.

I should not have done that.

Just because this is the way we've always done something doesn't mean that has to be the way that we do it.

And it made sense, and in that moment, we not only changed our entire practice for how we handled that situation, but to me, it was a call-out to, if something doesn't feel right, if you feel like you're about to make this big mistake, then you need to speak up and find those people that will reset you and talk through it to make sure you're very comfortable in the decision that you're going to make.

- So you had a gut check.

- Yes.

- What a great lesson, Reverend Hightower, share your biggest failure and what you learned from it, please.

- Well, I'm naturally an introvert and which is totally opposite.

- How to be a pastor?

- How to be a pastor, how to be a community leader as an introvert, and my father passed away when I was 17 years old, he was a pastor, a long time pastor here in Peoria at Morningstar church.

And so that was the biggest African-American church at the time, and me being an introvert never would have dreamed on stepping into a leadership position because I took more after my mother who was very introverted.

So my failure was stepping, failing to step into a leadership position at a younger age, it wasn't until I was in my thirties till I realized that I can step into a leadership position.

So I wasted a lot of years I believe, being so afraid or so introverted from stepping into the position.

But now I look back and I'm like, my goodness, think of where I could have been, but I don't let that detour me from what I'm doing now, I don't let it stop me from what I'm doing now, and I don't let it hinder where I would like to go.

So that to me was my biggest failure.

Failing to step up when I could have.

- Denying your destiny at an early age.

And, you know, as a pastor, it reminds me a little of Moses.

He said he wasn't a good communicator and he couldn't do it.

So he was looking for help but you always get people alongside you to help you, and what an extraordinary lesson I suspect you've learned how to be a situational extrovert when you need to be, you can turn it on.

But what people say after that sometimes is is it a little draining to you like after you preach a sermon or after you're front of a crowd, do you have to kind of retreat and recharge your own batteries?

- Yes it is, and my wife says that all the time you're different when you come home versus when you're in the public, I said, well, because you know it is draining because I have to go into to do something that I'm not really comfortable in doing public speaking still, even though I've been doing it for 25 years now I'm still uncomfortable in doing that.

So it is draining and I do have to recharge.

- But you taught yourself and thank heavens because the destiny, you know, did not pass you by.

- Yes, yes.

- Which is really exciting.

You know, Jim talks to us your biggest experience with the dirty 'F' word.

- It's long-term stuff, it's like reverend was talking about, it's a long-term factor of realizing, wait maybe I'm not who I thought I was back to entitlement.

- Because you mentioned fourth-generation your family owned this business.

- Since 1905, so.

- You didn't know anything about the car business?

- Its all and I thought it just, I guess I expected it naturally to come to me when it just didn't.

And every time I would fail over my first decade in the car business, I would blame it on other people.

I blame it on my father more than anything.

When in fact he really was out of the game for so many years but he would say one thing that he disagreed with and then I would, again, blame it on him to a point where I finally, he said I don't know that I wanna be in this anymore.

And I said, okay, well, I'll find the money to I'll find partners to buy you out of one of our stores we did exactly that.

And it was a story that I was running for a decade doing an awful job at, by the way.

- Thank you for your humility.

- It's always back to that, to the point where we raised money and even extra money to give us a healthy checking account to continue operating in a healthy fashion, that money was gone in weeks, the extra let alone the all the money that we did to buy the rest of the family out my parents.

And it was at that time where you don't have the money to pay payroll I couldn't go back, my dad had another store and I couldn't go back to him and ask him for more money, we had just bought them out.

And I said, it was his fault, now it was, I had no one to go to, I couldn't go to my new investors, I was too embarrassed.

And I couldn't go back to him because, well, again, I blamed it on him.

And it's at that time where I just didn't know where else to turn except the mirror.

And it's that accepting, that was the most defining time of my life of when you really realize maybe I'm not a this person I built myself up to be, and when you get down on that ground level you find that a lot of people care, a lot of people want to succeed and they want me to succeed.

And so you just gotta be real, and you ask them the stupid questions.

Like, how do you change oil?

You ask them about what do you ask them?

I asked them what I did wrong, what I do wrong.

And, for the most part they told me to stick to my guns.

I say a lot, but I don't practice it.

So at age 35, it's the first time I grew up.

And it's all because of realizing I failed.

- Thank you for your transparency.

What great lessons there for all of us?

Well, American motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar said if you learn from defeat, you haven't really lost.

So we've talked about the lessons that our panelists have learned already, and we just wanna hear a little bit more about the lessons that come from it, and we are there organizational lessons that you've learned from failure Angela?

- Organizational lessons probably through orientation.

So we wanna start at the beginning, set people up for success, it's in everyone.

again, everyone's best interest to start off on the right foot to partner them not only with all the training and tools that they need to do their job successfully, but also partner them with those mentors.

If you surround them with people who have been around a while who have the experience, who have made mistakes on their own, you're more likely to help that person succeed and not have a massive failure later on because they know they're safe.

We're a bit of a safety net there.

So I think that that's kind of how we build that foundation from the start.

- Makes so much sense, reverend Hightower, talk to us about organizational failures.

- Well when I became a pastor, of course, I just mentioned my dad was a longtime pastor of a large church, and so I thought just, he said I just inherently knew how to be a pastor which I really didn't even know I went to school it's different when you step into the office and sit in their chair.

Yes, and versus when you looking at a book in the same way you do these steps it doesn't work that way.

So I had to reorganize my thinking and accepting meaning I had to humble myself and say, well I don't know it all, I'm gonna have to ask some of the congregation members, some of the leaders that were a part of the church, how to do certain things, because I don't know.

And then also when I stepped into the presidency of the NAACP our branches are over a hundred years old.

It was founded in 1915, and our former president had been there for 20, 21 22 years.

So I'm stepping into this organization with, even though I was part of it, much different organizations, then the church is even set up.

So I had to learn two organizations differently while at the same time, maintaining a standard of being effective, so it was very hard for me not to retreat because of my being an introvert, but I fought through it, humbled myself, asked the questions, and then also was willing to take correction because sometimes as a leader, it's hard to take correction from someone that you're leading.

I took correction and I still make mistakes but I'm willing to face them now and built a team around me to help me, and guide me.

- Such great information, such great lessons.

Well, Winston Churchill said success is not final, failure is not fatal, it is the courage to continue that counts.

And that just takes me back, Jim, to your story.

I mean, thank you again for being so vulnerable but how long did it take you?

How long was this process?

- Well, it still happens, so the process is still going on.

I, and by the way, when you recognize that when I recognize that the switch is immediate and the success just keep on coming, and I have to admit the successes almost come from a lack of failure than actual great ideas of success.

So there's a lot of rule books I wouldn't say in life, but certainly in business, certainly in the franchise business, there's a lot of it's already on paper of how to succeed.

So, or you can open up your mind and follow that and read the right books and talk to the right people interview the right people, successful people, and you learn that you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Just maybe stay away from these awful mistakes that in an instant can just take you out.

So I probably, through that time at 35 years old it's such an impact of my life, I like to stay away from it as much as I can, and that tends to give me a smile more often than that.

- That's great, such good advice, well, Forbes magazine has these five tips to make peace with failure.

Don't make it personal, I'm gonna go back to you, Jim, just for a second, how do you not make that personal?

- I have no clue, I do.

- At least allow it to be in the past and not the present.

- Yeah, I take pride in being wrong, the problem is I'm so darn stubborn to get there.

A lot of people kinda give up of trying to prove me wrong because I just keep on fighting, 'cause I think I'm right, I think I'm right, I think I'm right.

But that moment of when I realized oh my gosh, I'm not right, I'm wrong.

And I'm the first thing that's gonna come to me as a smile.

And I'm so happy that someone or something finally convinced me of it, because now I'm not gonna go down that path anymore.

I can learn, and I love nothing more.

The problem is it takes me a long time.

There's a lot of security to get through there, but it's fun.

- That's great, our next tip don't, you've got to learn and adapt, stop dwelling on it, release the need for approval from others and try a new point of view.

You know, Angela, how do you try a new point of view after you've failed?

- Just like these two gentlemen, I'm also in a family business, so my point of view comes from my family.

You know if I do something that's not quite the way that they thought that it should have been done, we talk about it and we not only talk about it at work but we talk about at the dinner table, and we talk about it at the kids' sporting events.

So there is an opportunity to learn from the failures that they have had as they've built and founded and grown the organization, but also to say to see what you did here, it was good, but it wasn't great.

So let's modify this, what do you think?

What do I think?

It's not always comfortable, I don't always enjoy it, but in the end we can get to a place that is better and more successful than where we were.

- Do you feel that you have become more comfortable with the uncomfortable?

- Yes, I live in the uncomfortable.

Being from a family that is very open with sharing their failures, but seeing their successes, I have to humble myself and say I don't want to do this right now, I don't feel like this is what I want to do right now, but wow, look where it got you.

And if I, you know check my own emotions and do a little more listening, a little less talking and try it, let see that outcome.

And once we see that outcome now there's another room for discussion and either see I was right or wow, you were right, and most of the time, it's the while you are right.

Maybe I'll do it that way next time.

- It's such a good learning, learning.

We learn so much from that dirty little 'F' word.

Well, Nelson Mandela said do not judge me by my successes.

Judge me by how many times I fell and got back up.

Reverend Hightower, let's talk about those falling and getting back up, and the learning that comes from that and not quitting.

Were there times when you just wanted to throw up your hands and say, I quit, I can't do this?

- Oh yeah, yesterday.

- No, but seriously being, and I'll go back to my dad again being that he had such a vibrant minister in his legacy lives on today, and even though he's been gone dead, passed away for 30 over 30 years, his legacy lives on.

So I find myself having to program myself not to compare myself to him, and where he was and what he did and how he did things, and then I also learned, I have to learn how to adapt and not adopt what he did or anyone else that I'm learning from that it's a whole lot it's more gray than black and white.

So I'm learning as I go that I can't compare myself to him that I can adapt, not adopt, and that it's a whole lot it's a more gray than black and white.

- You know, that's so important, especially during these divisive times in our country to be adaptive, to accept others' thoughts and bring that in and we're not just right or wrong, how can that help us from a healing, you know, our failures can they help us heal as a society as well?

- Oh yes no doubt, and everybody has ideas and it takes all of us working together, but it takes two things are willing and a warning to work together to make it better for the overall community I'm not gonna be always right, you're not gonna be always right, and we're gonna disagree, but we can't disagree to the point where I'm gonna take my ball off the court and go home.

We can disagree, but not be disagreeable realizing on tomorrow, we come back together again and we focus on what's really important.

What were the goal that we're trying to achieve and I think that would go a long way in the country and our community as well, that we all have different ideas.

But if we have an established goal which means to raise our community up for the betterment of everyone, then when we all do better, we all do better.

So we keep that as a goal, even though we get into our scrapes because I'm gonna disagree on how you wanna get there, and you're gonna disagree with the way I'm gonna get there, but at the end of the day if we could just come back together the next day and we can continue to work to move forward.

- And I think that leads up to respect.

Respecting the views that are different than ours but that we have a shared common goal.

And that's so important when it comes to failure who can build on that?

The common goal of getting together, and I'm sure every organization, especially in a family owned business, I mean, you're passionate.

How do you take that passion and use it in a good, productive way Jim?

- I don't know that I can take credit of always using it in a good way, I think right now, sometimes I'm a little too recog what's the right term?

I recognize failure too quickly.

- Is there such a thing as recognizing it too quickly?

Help me understand that a little bit.

- It sounds sometimes too insensitive.

I'm quick to point out myself, I'm fine pointed out of myself, but I'm quick to point it out, and maybe some employees or maybe my family, my wife or my kids, and that has the adverse risk effect.

I'm not sensitive enough because I like pointing it out.

I learned from it myself, like I said, my favorite is looking in the mirror and say, no you shouldn't have done that, let's try this, let's try this.

And I sometimes think, well, that's what they need to hear.

Okay, you shouldn't have done that, let's try this, let's try this.

And right now of how sensitive things are right now in this day and age, sometimes it doesn't work out telling them what's wrong.

- You know what, I can connect and relate to you on this because I am guilty especially ask my 20 year old college student, and he'll say, mom points out all my failures, all my mistakes, but I always say, if people know our hearts, my heart in correcting a mistake is not to say, nanny, nanny, nanny, you screwed up.

It's to help you learn how to protect you from the bad consequences of those mistakes.

So I've got the sense that your heart is in the right place, but sometimes people can't hear it in that manner in which, and I I'm feeling pretty good about saying the manner in which you mean it.

- Yeah that's what I believe exactly what you just said.

However, then it comes back a lot of times as well, you think I'm bad than nanny nanny, and then they come back with more of a nanny nanny nanny and it's just not the direction I wanted to go.

So I do have to be and learn how to be more sensitive when I recognize failure and not exactly bring that up square between the eyes of how I would want it, whereas my wife's says, no, you don't want it that way.

You're also very sensitive to your own failures.

Maybe I'm the one that wants to recognize that.

But whatever the case I'm learning.

- And isn't that what life is all about, we learn, we live, we're a little bit better today than we were yesterday, and we can make such great progress.

I hate that our time is running out so quickly.

I just have time for one final thought, my friend on the importance of learning lessons from our failures and Angela I'm gonna let you have the last word my friend - It is important learning to deal with your failure, as you start out in a, any career at all, you are human and you're going to make mistakes.

And you have to make sure that you are willing to own them be self-aware of your tendencies and recognize that there is a bigger thing at play here.

And as long as you are trying to do your best then your failure can be fixed, your failure can be adapted, it can be corrected and you can make it right in the end.

So I guess in the end, it's okay to fail.

- I love it, it's okay to fail, this is what we need to know.

Thank you so much to these great central Illinois leaders for helping us bond with that dirty little 'F' word failure, and to learn the lessons that will set us up for success.

Next week on critical conversations, we're talking about creative courage.

Thanks so much for joining us, I look forward to seeing you back here again, next time, good night, my friends (gentle music)