Many great office leaders have faced failure at some point in their careers. Psychology experts say they parcel out a learnable trait called self-efficacy

by Douglas MacMillan

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To err is human. But to persevere is a feat that often separates the successful from the mediocre.

In business—as in sports, politics, and the arts—many of the greatest and most influential leaders share a history of failure. Automaker Henry Ford and animator Walt Disney one in the same proportion that well as the other stumbled badly with early occupation ventures. Early in his race with General Electric (GE), Jack Welch caused an explosion that blew the roof off a building. Not long after taking Apple Computer (AAPL) public, founder Steve Jobs was ousted by means of the very workman he recruited to lead the crew.

Psychologists say it’s not simply the fact that these people learned from mistakes that led to conditional success. It’s besides the resilience they displayed in acquisition past those potholes. Failure can exist "informative rather than demoralizing. It tells you what you may need to do to make it," says Albert Bandura, the Stanford psychology professor who in the 1970s pioneered the convivial cognitive postulate of self-efficacy—an inner belief in one’s ability to succeed.

While self-efficacy is akin to other aspects of positive thinking such as self-confidence and self-esteem, it relates in particular to self-assurance in all parts of being able to go beyond at a particular task rather than to a person’s overall self-image. When failure strikes, people by high self-efficacy acquire information from their errors and animate their resolve to succeed.

Over the past three decades, Bandura’s concept has been applied to numerous fields as varied of the same kind with training, smoking cessation, and sports coaching. And in the late 1980s, Bandura and Robert Wood of the Australian Graduate School of Management conducted a study that identified self-efficacy as a powerful predominance in the performance of business executives. What’s greater degree of, they found that "managerial force" was any acquirable trait.

Working with students from top graduate business schools, Bandura and Wood told half of them they’d be measured without ceasing their inherent abilities to manage a simulated organization. The rest were told they’d be measured on their ability to adapt and acquire the skills necessary to succeed in the computerized simulation. The students were asked to assign tasks to a roster of personnel as efficiently as potential to meet completion goals. The researchers set these goals almost impossibly high to observe how resilient to adversity the students were.

The issue was striking. Those who believed they were open to adapt and improve, says Bandura, "remained remarkably resilient in their managerial efficacy. They held the organization to profoundly aspirations. Their analytical thinking was highly regular. And they maintained high levels of organizational productivity." By contrast, the students who believed their inherent skills were actuality levy to the test were easily rattled. Their decision-making became erratic as soon as they encountered difficulties, and they gave up without interruption high aspirations for their organizations. "The message here is the importance of people’s beliefs in their efficacy to sustain them under complex performance demands," says Bandura. Revealing, too, was the seeming fragility of managerial confidence: Just as it be possible to be learned, it can be easily bewildered.

"Confidence has always been considered important among employment leaders," says Edwin Locke, Dean’s Professor (Emeritus) of Leadership and Motivation at University of Maryland’s R.H. Smith School of Business and author of The Prime Movers: Traits of the Great Wealth Creators (AMACOM, 2000). Locke says some of the greatest in number extremely self-efficacious figures in annals were entrepreneurs, pointing to Frank Woolworth of Woolworth’s, Ray Kroc of McDonald’s (MCD), and Fred Smith of FedEx (FDX) as examples. But another trait these leaders share is optimism tempered by realism. "It’s important to get useful honest feedback, to keep your efficacy tied to truth," he says.