“I Failed in My First Director Role. Can I Recover and Grow?”
How senior leaders can learn the right lessons, rebuild credibility, and recognize when a fresh start is the smartest move
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Today’s Level Up: Inside Executive Coaching (your behind-the-scenes look at real coaching discussions) explores how senior leaders recover from failure, rebuild credibility, and learn the right lessons without losing the strengths that made them successful.
The Situation
Recently, I spoke with Langston, a Senior Engineering leader from a large fintech company who had just gone through what he described as “the worst professional semester of his life.”
After years of strong performance, he had accepted his first Director role.
On paper, it looked like the exact kind of opportunity he had been working towards:
Greater scope.
More cross-functional impact.
And a path toward executive leadership.
But 9 months later…
He was leaving the company after what he openly described as a failure.
Why He Failed
Langston recognized exactly why he had failed: the role depended almost entirely on influence rather than authority.
He wasn’t ready for this.
He had been expected to coordinate work across organizations he didn’t control, solve politically difficult problems, and build alignment without owning the people or resources required to execute.
He got off to a rocky start, and his credibility slipped. It became harder and harder to influence others, even after he began changing his approach.
His question wasn’t whether he had failed.
He already knew he had, and he openly admitted it.
What he wanted to know was whether he was learning the right lesson from the experience, and how he could get back on his feet in another director-level role.
The Question
One thing I really enjoyed about this coaching session was that Langston came with a great, nuanced question.
What he asked:
“How do senior leaders recover after a real failure without losing the strengths that made them successful in the first place?”
And, more acutely:
“How do you rebuild credibility after underperforming?
And how do you know whether the problem was you, or the situation you were put into?”
Learn the Right Lesson
The other thing I loved about this interaction was that Langston was not looking for a pat on the back. Most people want reassurance after a setback; they want someone to tell them it wasn’t their fault.
He wanted to know what could actually be learned from this scenario and what just needed to be left behind.
This is a really important distinction.
Failures can make you a much stronger leader, but only if you extract the right lessons.
If you try to change everything about yourself after a failure, you risk overcorrecting for one bad experience and becoming worse in other aspects of your performance.