Matthew Egan is the author The Failure Advantage: Why Setbacks Are Your Secret Weapon for Success, which explores how leaders and teams turn setbacks into a source of trust, learning, and growth.
Drawing on two decades in consulting and technology leadership, including at Microsoft, Matt writes about reframing our relationship with failure as a path to higher performance.
A few years ago, I ran a development day for my team.
Every minute was planned: a morning reviewing objectives, an afternoon of skills workshops. It was designed, if I’m honest, to project competence.
At lunch, sitting informally with the group, I said something I hadn’t planned to say. As a relatively new joiner, I admitted I was struggling to read the organisation’s unwritten rules — the politics behind certain decisions, the history I hadn’t lived through. It was a brief, unguarded ten minutes before we moved on to the afternoon agenda.
In the weeks that followed, something shifted. People started checking in with me more. A colleague forwarded an email thread with extra context I clearly needed. Someone else invited me for coffee to explain a tricky relationship between two departments. None of this was asked for — it just started happening.
Looking back, that unplanned ten minutes did more for my standing with the team than the entire carefully designed day around it. I hadn’t lost authority by admitting what I didn’t know. I’d gained something more valuable: trust.
Why this is harder than it sounds — especially in tech
None of this is intuitive advice, and it’s worth saying why. Tech is an industry built on a particular kind of status: technical mastery. Knowing the answer, understanding the system better than anyone else in the room, being the person others defer to on how something works — that’s often exactly what got people hired, promoted, and taken seriously in the first place. Admitting you got something wrong can feel like it threatens the very thing that earned you your seat at the table.
I’ve felt that pull myself, plenty of times. It’s a natural instinct to double down on expertise rather than expose the gaps in it. But over years I’ve come to see it as exactly backwards. The leaders and engineers people trust most aren’t the ones who never get anything wrong — they’re the ones who are honest the moment they do.
The trust actually comes from the failure, not despite it
We tend to assume trust is built by looking competent. It’s mostly built the opposite way — and two things have shaped how I think about this more than anything else.
The first is Dr Brené Brown’s work on vulnerability, which she defines as uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Her research found it to be “our most accurate measurement of courage,” not the weakness we instinctively treat it as. That reframing matters because it explains why hiding a mistake doesn’t actually protect your credibility — it just creates distance. People don’t trust colleagues who never seem to get anything wrong. They trust colleagues who, when they do, own it plainly and move straight to fixing it.
The second is something I’ve watched happen at genuine scale, inside Microsoft. Under Satya Nadella, the company deliberately moved from what he called a “know-it-all” culture — one built on the same technical-mastery status I mentioned above — to a “learn-it-all” one. Teams began sharing failure stories openly in meetings instead of burying them. I’ve seen the effect of that shift first-hand: problems get raised earlier, and people spend far less energy managing appearances. When an organisation the size of Microsoft can make that trade and come out stronger for it, it’s a fairly strong signal that the instinct to protect your expert reputation by hiding mistakes is the wrong one — at any scale, in any team.
Three ways to put this into practice
You don’t need to be the most senior person in the room for any of these.
- Name your own mistake first – Don’t wait for someone else to surface it or for it to become obvious. Being the one who says “I got this wrong” — before you’re asked — is the single fastest way to build credibility, not lose it.
- Replace “whose fault is this” with “what did we learn – This is a two-second shift in language that changes an entire conversation, whether you’re leading the debrief or just the one who asks the question first.
- Let people see you not know something – Try saying “I don’t know — what do you think?” out loud in a meeting, especially if you’re used to being the one with answers. It’s a small sentence that gives everyone else permission to be honest too.
The payoff
None of this makes failure disappear, and it isn’t about eliminating high standards. It’s about where the energy goes. Teams that can talk honestly about what’s not working solve problems while they’re still small. Teams that can’t spend that same energy managing appearances instead — right up until the problem is too big to hide.
The next time something goes wrong on your team, you get to choose what happens next. Say it plainly, ask what you can learn, and watch what it does to how much people trust you.
