Are you creating a culture where your team is afraid to fail—or one where they’re empowered to grow?

In this powerful episode, Neal Reyes shares a transformative leadership principle that has shaped his success over nearly three decades in business: failing forward. With transparency, wisdom, and a touch of humor, Neal dives deep into what it truly means to give your team the freedom to stumble—and how that freedom can unlock their greatest growth.

Whether you’re a CEO, a team leader, or simply someone looking to grow personally or professionally, this episode offers a fresh perspective on how mistakes, when handled with care, become launchpads—not liabilities.

🔥 In this episode, you’ll discover:

• How to create a safe environment for growth in your organization
• Why some mistakes are worth making—and others are worth learning from
• The difference between falling backward vs. falling forward
• How to coach and lead through failure with clarity and compassion
• Why failing forward is a secret ingredient to building world-class teams

This isn’t just about leadership—it’s about leading with heart. Tune in for practical strategies, inspiring stories, and actionable insights that will encourage you to lead better, build stronger teams, and grow through every challenge.

🎙️ Listen now—because sometimes, your next big step forward starts with a stumble.

Chapters:

• 00:06 - The Principle of Success in Business
• 03:21 - Failing Forward: Embracing Growth and Leadership
• 11:10 - The Principle of Failing Forward in Leadership
• 17:48 - The Principle of Failing Forward
• 29:06 - Building World-Class Teams through Leadership

Mentioned in this episode:

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To inquire about 1:1 coaching with Neal, please visit nealreyes.com/now.

Hey, what's up, guys?

This is your host, Neal Reyes, and I'm so excited you joined us for today's episode.

Today I'm gonna be teaching you a principle that I learned in business many years ago that has led to such significant success in all the businesses that I've ran.

This is something that has led to an environment where employees love coming to work and as a result, the turnover is low.

They enjoy their environment, and when they come in, it leads to increased productivity.

And in addition, has set us up to be able to scale our businesses and grow not just year after year, but month after month.

I'm so excited and ready to share this with you.

Get ready.

This is your captain speaking.

We want to let you know we've been cleared for takeoff.

We have clear skies today with no winds, so we are expecting a smooth and highly enjoyable flight.

However, should you experience some personal turbulence, don't worry as you've chosen the right airline.

As we are trained in navigating unexpected bumps, our destination today is high performance and success.

Sit back, relax, get hyped, or do whatever you do.

As we too are pumped for today's flight, we understand you have options when you fly, and we are grateful that you have chosen to fly with us today.

We recognize by choosing to fly in il Reyes, you are committed to growing personal development and reaching higher than you ever have before.

Enjoy today's flight, be blessed, and remember, the best is yet to come.

What's up, champion?

This is your host, Neal Reyes, and I want to welcome you to the Executive Perspective.

For years I struggled to answer the question, what do you do for a living?

Why?

Because most people who ask only expect to hear one thing.

I am an executive with a deep level of understanding of business, operations, leadership, and technology.

I'm also the president and founder of a worldwide ministry and CEO of an executive coaching and consulting firm.

My number one passion is people and I receive significant gratitude in life from sowing into others and encouraging them as they grow to achieve their fullest potential.

If you're a high performance individual like me, or.

Or you're simply ready to take your business leadership or inner potential to the next level, then strap in because I'm locked in and all in.

This is the executive Perspective.

Hey, what's up, guys?

This is your host, Neal Reyes, and I want to welcome you to another episode.

So excited about today.

Today I'm going to be teaching you about something that's very dear to me.

This is a principle that the Lord showed me years ago in leadership.

And I'VE learned to cultivate over the years among my teams and has always led to growth.

Growth in them, growth in our business, growth in me as a leader for allowing them to do this.

And the topic I want to talk to you about today is what I refer to as failing forward.

Years ago, the Lord showed me that so many times in jobs, people feel as if they can't make any mistakes, that if they make a bad mistake, it's going to go look bad on their annual review, or if they make a mistake, potentially, if it's big enough, they can get fired.

And that can happen in some cases, of course.

But what I've learned is that in leadership, when you give your people what I refer to as to room to breathe, they can become more successful.

You know, if you own a business or if you're running a business, as a leader, there are different employees at all different levels.

Now, the fact of the matter is, as much as, as leaders, we would like all of our employees to scale.

The fact is, that's not going to happen.

There are those who are just fine.

They're content doing what they do, and they don't want to rise through the ranks.

There are others that regardless whether they want to rise or not, they may not be equipped to rise to the ranks and they need either more help or they need more mentoring, or in some cases, they just have a ceiling within their work environment.

And that's okay.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But at the same time, there are others that, as you sow into them, they reciprocate and they grow.

But in order to grow, you have to also give them room to fail.

The topic that we're talking about today and failing forward is something that the Lord showed me many years ago.

I'll give you an example right away of what I mean by this and what it looks like, and then walk you through what I have seen and experienced within my own life.

Now, understand that the things I teach you about in leadership.

And remember, this podcast is focused on three main areas.

It focuses on leadership, business strategy, and personal development.

And just about everything we speak about fits into those categories in one way or another.

Now, at the same time as I'm speaking about this, one of the things I want you to understand is that the things I teach in leadership aren't things I necessarily read in some book or that I learned in a class or a course or something of that nature, watched in a video or something.

These are things that I have cultivated over the years within my own walk.

In fact, it's very similar to how I also lead my ministry.

My ministry is based off of the things I've experienced in my own walk and in leadership.

This is something that's dear to me.

I have almost 28 years, or actually about this year, 28 years of management experience, and I've been at the C level for over 15 years.

The things I'm teaching are things that I use that the Lord showed me to rise through the ranks.

And I'm so grateful for that.

And I will tell you that I'm so grateful for every leader I ever served underneath.

I'm going to say that again.

I'm so grateful for every leader I ever served.

Dunder, if you're out there and you're recognizing my name as you see it, come across on the podcast or our videos, and you know who I am, and you say, hey, that guy used to work for me, thank you.

Thank you for all you did to help me grow into the person I am today.

Now, that being said, I'm saying that from a place where not every leader I had was an amazing leader.

However, every leader I had contributed to my growth in one way or another, but it was all based on what I was going to do with it.

How was I going to learn from it?

It's not about critiquing the people we work for and judging them.

There are leaders for a reason.

But when we study the people around us and we study the leaders, the good ones and the bad ones, and I've been blessed to have mostly good and in there, I've also had some very amazing people I've worked with as well, and worked for as well, I should say.

But that being said, what I learned over time is that people are going to make mistakes.

I make mistakes.

I'm not perfect.

If you're perfect, then maybe this ain't the right podcast for you.

However, there's a good chance you're listening to this and you know as well as I do you're not perfect either.

That doesn't mean you can't be really good, though.

But perfection, that's just something that's elusive within business.

In fact, I will tell you that if you're striving for perfection, one of our episodes we have coming up at some point is going to be where I teach on chasing or not chasing, but pursuing.

I'll straighten that out.

Not chasing, pursuing, on pursuing progress over perfection.

And when you learn how to pursue progress over perfection, man, you start to grow pretty fast.

But what I will tell you and what I learned within my own leadership style and growing as a person was that people make mistakes.

But there's two types of state mistakes you can make.

You can make those that you learn from or those that you don't learn from and you're destined to repeat.

I'm going to say that again.

This is a key point right here.

This is an unlock.

There are two types of mistakes that people make in business and in leadership and life in general.

There are those that mistakes that you make, that you learn from, and then there are those mistakes that you don't learn from and are destined to repeat.

Now, as a good leader, you should be able to coach and mentor your people, your staff, your employees in a way that you're able to show them the mistakes you've made and teach them how you grew from that.

So hopefully they don't make the same mistake themselves.

But the types of mistakes that we want to allow our employees to make and our people to make so that they can grow is what I refer to as mistakes when they fell forward and not fell backward.

Now, to paint the picture, consider it like this.

Let's say you're walking down the sidewalk, and as you're walking down the sidewalk, and you know, sometimes sidewalks have seams in them that aren't always even.

But let's say you're walking down the sidewalk and you're focused on what's ahead, but not what's immediately in front of you.

But you know, 30, 40, 50ft out and you're not paying attention to what's immediately in your walking path in front of you.

Well, let's say you're walking and you stumble or you trip.

If you trip and you fall forward or you stumble and you then you fall and you fall forward.

When you pick yourself up, you should be further down the sidewalk or down the path than you were at the point where you first stumbled or first fell fell down.

So again, you're walking forward, you trip, but you fall forward, even if it's only a few feet.

When you get up, you fell, but you fell forward, meaning that even though you tripped up or stumbled or fell, you fell forward but still gained ground, meaning you were still moving forward.

However, if you're walking and you trip but you fall backward, you lose your balance and fall backward and land on your butt or land on your back.

When you stand up, you're not getting up at the same place where you fell.

You're getting up a couple feet or several feet behind where you fell, and that's when you lose ground that's what the principle of failing forward means within business and within leadership.

When you have an environment that you cultivate, that is a safe environment where people know that they have the freedom to make mistakes and not get penalized when they do that.

And I'm not talking about sloppy environment where they make mistake after mistake.

And let me just clarify for you, because there are those who are probably thinking like man, but sometimes you can't fail.

And you're exactly right.

We all have the different things within our jobs that you just cannot fail at.

Maybe it's an event that you're hosting or a speech that you have to give or a presentation or a review or something.

There can be so many different things in leadership.

You know what they are.

I don't need to paint them out for you.

You know what they are.

They're coming to mind for you already.

And if not, you'll understand them when you and when you encounter them.

There are those things where you know you can't make mistakes.

There are things where we have to cross every T and dot every I because we have to get it right.

But not everything we do, not every task, not every project, not every responsibility should have to be like that.

Otherwise we're seeking perfection over progress.

And when you're giving guidelines to your employees, you need to do it in a manner that's clear and effective.

You need to give them room to make mistakes.

But if you have an employee who makes the same mistake over and over and over again, that's a clear indication that they're not learning from their mistake and they're going to be continued or to or be doomed to repeat it over and over again.

In fact, I will tell you that that is what the definition of insanity is.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result.

In business, we have to be able to give the freedom for people to make mistakes and to fail.

But we also had need to expect from our employees.

And as an employee, no matter what level you're at, whether if you're at the very top or in the midd somewhere or at the bottom, it does not matter.

You have to be able to also expect of yourself and be able to honor your employer that when you make a mistake, you're going to take accountability over it.

You're going to not wait till it's caught or someone points it out.

You'll speak with your supervisor and be a good steward and understand this is different for every environment.

You know, just like there's Good employees and bad employees.

There's good bosses and there's bad bosses.

In fact, sometimes there's a lot of crappy bosses out there.

And I don't mean it to sound kind of crass when I say that, but everybody knows when someone's a bad boss.

And unfortunately, you're just going to have to gauge your particular work environment because you'll know whether or not if you can be transparent enough to share when you've made mistakes.

But what I will tell you is that if you're in an environment where you are genuinely uncertain about if you can be honest with your employer, then that's probably not the right environment for you to be in, because that's an environment where you're always going to be hindered by what others are going to think of you.

Or, and I should say it more like this because in our advanced mindset, which I teach a lot, you shouldn't be focused on what do they think about me, how are they going to think about this?

You shouldn't be concerned about that.

However, if you're working in an environment, you shouldn't always be scared for your job.

Now understand, when people are scared for their job, the first thing they have to do is search inside.

Is this just them?

Is this something with them and not their employer?

Because I've had employees that work for me and at times I have felt impressed in the spirit.

I felt impressed by the Lord that I needed to go in the office that day or I needed to come out of my office and go out on the floor and talk to employees.

Just encourage them and tell them how much I appreciate them, tell them how grateful I am, and to openly share that their jobs are safe.

And when I do, you see a wash of emotion just wash over them and they're just so relieved.

And sometimes they'll come back and tell me, I'm so glad I needed to hear that today.

And even though we give our employees, in my environment, underneath my leadership, we give constant praise, we give constant coaching.

We never allow an employee to get to the point where they have an annual review and they don't know whether they swung for the fence and hit it or if they struck out.

We never leave an employee hanging like that.

We give constant coaching, we give constant feedback.

I give a mid year review and I give an end of year review, their annual review because I want our employees to know at all times how they're doing.

And I believe in a firm belief of setting people up for success and not setting them up for failure.

But even doing all of that, even walking by and telling them how much I appreciate them, even having my leaders tell them how much they appreciate them and value them, even then sometimes people come in and they're struggling internal, whether it's because they deal with doubt or they deal with other things from their past, or maybe they had a rough weekend and they genuinely feel like their job's in trouble.

I'm going to tell you that we want to help people, we want to love on people, we want to make it to where their job feels safe to them and they know that they have a safe place to grow.

But one of the best ways to do it is by openly teaching the principle of failing forward and also reaffirming why it's safe to make mistakes within the environment that you lead.

If you're a business owner, this is especially important because as a business owner, especially of a small to medium business, you don't have quite as much room to make errors as they do within a corporate world.

Because in a large corporate company and one employee leaves, that might not impact them real strong because they got 20 or 30 other employees that can take their place or at least share the workload or they can turn around because of the resources they have and place job potions out there and find people much quicker.

In a small to medium business, sometimes you don't have all that luxury.

But whether you're in the large corporate space or a small to medium business, doesn't matter where you're at treating your people with an atmosphere of letting them know it's okay to make mistakes.

But there's two types of mistakes a person can make.

There are those that they learn from and then there are those mistakes that they don't learn from that they're destined to to repeat the same mistake over again.

And remember the destin the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again.

Guys, when we talk about failing forward, it's about giving your employees boundaries.

So another way I would say it, and I always draw this on a whiteboard.

I know obviously we're on video for some of you who are watching this by video, but on our podcast you're listening to me, so I'm going to paint a picture with my word rather than using a whiteboard.

But here's what I will tell you.

Let's say that you're out on a highway out in the middle of the country and it's a two lane road and there's two lanes going in the same direction and maybe there's a big median on the other side.

There's two lanes going in the opposite direction, but you're on the direction that's facing north.

Let's just say you're on the road that's facing north.

Two lane highway, both lanes going in the same direction, headed north.

If you stand in the middle of that road and you're looking forward, there's a shoulder on the right and there's a shoulder on the left and there's a dashed line, especially if you're in America, there's a dashed line that goes through the middle that separates it or divides it up into two lanes.

When you're leading with employees, it's much like taking them out on the highway and telling them this is your road that you need to drive on.

But you see the shoulder on the right and you see the shoulder on the left.

Those are your boundaries.

If you turn around and go outside the boundaries, you're going to drive off the road.

And when you drive off the road, especially the faster you go, it can lead to a wreck.

I don't want you getting hurt, I don't want you damaging your car, but I also don't want you hurting the car you're in.

And what's the car you're in.

It's the business you're there helping you run.

It's the business that they're helping you lead.

And so you show them.

Right shoulder, don't go past the right shoulder.

Left shoulder, don't go past the left shoulder.

But you see these two lanes, you can drive through these two lanes however you want.

I'll show you how I drive so you know my style, but you're going to have to cultivate your own style.

Just know where the boundaries are at the right shoulder and the left shoulder.

And as you drive forward, there are those who like to drive in the right lane, but there are those who like to drive and the left lane.

But you want to know what both those lanes lead to the same direction.

They may not get there at the same pace because maybe there's traffic in the right lane and rather than choosing to get in the left lane to pass, they just stay behind the traffic.

Well, they're going to get to the place just the same as you are.

They just may not get there as quick.

And that's where coaching comes in.

And then there are those that like to zigzag in and out, in and out of traffic.

They like to go from the right lane to the left lane, to the right lane to the left lane.

Because they got places to be, things to do.

But if you go outside the shoulder, that's when bad things can happen.

Well, that's how leadership works.

And when you give your employees information about the environment, it should be so clear that if you wrote it down, anyone who read it could do the same thing because they know where the boundaries are.

In other words, it's clear they have clear communication.

But you also need to give them the freedom of knowing how to make mistakes in the correct manner.

Remember, if you're walking down that sidewalk or path and you trip, if you trip and fall forward, when you get back up, you've actually still gained ground even though you fail, because you're getting up further down the path than where you were when you first tripped or stumbled.

But if you trip and you go backwards now you've lost ground.

Here's how that works.

If you trip and you go forward, that's like making the mistake that you made a mistake, but you learned and you're going to grow from.

And if you go down that path again, you're not going to trip over the same thing because you remember the mistake you made.

And maybe you won't encounter that same part in the path anymore.

But let's just say it was a part of the sidewalk, that there was a tree next to it, and it was the roots growing under the sidewalk that pushed it up.

Well, if you get a hundred yards down the path and you're walking down the sidewalk and there's another tree on the side, this time you might remember that where there's trees on the sides of sidewalks, not all sidewalks, but some of them, the sidewalk pushes up when the roots grow under it.

And you're going to know to be more cautious that time.

But if you make the mistake or your employees make the mistake where you trip and fall backwards, that's the mistake that you're destined to repeat because you didn't learn anything from it and you fail backwards.

Now, don't take this over literal.

If you happen to have this happen and you're like, well, I fell, but I learned something.

I learned that hurt like crazy, and I didn't do that again.

Well, fair enough, but I'm just giving you some analogies to help you with leadership.

But understand, this is the principle of failing forward.

And what I want to tell you is that when someone fails forward, growth is still possible.

Growth is still possible.

In fact, I will tell you that some of the most valuable times of learning is when a person makes a mistake, because if they're coached correctly to where they understand what they did, then they're more likely to not make that mistake again.

In fact, I will tell you that even if you have someone working for you who makes a very large mistake, that shouldn't always be an automatic response to fire them or let them go.

And the reason why I say that is because if you fire them and you have to bring someone else in, you're hoping they're not going to make that same mistake, and you're going to have to try to teach them off of someone else's error, which can certainly be done, and it can certainly be effective.

However, it's never going to be as effective as teaching the person who made the mistake initially why they can't make that mistake again, unless you have one of those really special cases where they're just going to continue to do it over and over because they're not learning.

In that case, you may have no choice.

But I always believe that whenever we're working with staff, at least this is how I do it, and this is how I've raised my leaders for years, is that anytime we have to make any type of a change with an employee, we never do so without first examining ourselves and answering the question, did I do everything I possibly could to help this employee grow?

Was my communication clear?

Were the instructions I gave clear?

Did I give the right coaching?

Did I give the right mentoring?

Did I give the right tools they needed for the job?

Did I give them the right resources?

Was I overworking them?

Or was I helping them to get out of the office when they should so they'd come back and be rested?

There's so many things that go into that.

But when you can go down that checklist and say you've done everything, sometimes you're still faced with having to make a difficult decision.

And if you ever have to let go of an employee, it should never be easy.

It shouldn't.

Because you're messing with someone's life, like it or not, and you may not be responsible for necessarily what their actions were that led to that, but because they were under your leadership and your tutelage, it should never feel good to have to fire an employee.

I'm not saying it should push you into the depression or something stupid like that, but you shouldn't just do it out of on the whim where it just doesn't matter.

In fact, I will tell you, if you're the kind of person who makes decisions like that, you're probably not going to have a lot of employees that want to work for you because you're going to get some reputations pretty quick.

You know, there are.

There are websites dedicated to simply allowing past employees to comment and current employees about their work environments so that people can turn around and go and look and see what that environment's like before they ever go and work there.

Now, they're not always accurate to follow because usually the ones that are leaving the reviews are the ones that are disgruntled.

But there's the only telling one side of the story.

Always keep in mind, if you're reviewing one of their sites, there's always three sides to every story.

I'm going to say there's always, always, always three sides to every story.

There's the person A who has a side.

There's person B.

And the truth is usually somewhere in the middle.

It might be closer to person A, it might be closer to person B, but the truth is always somewhere in the middle.

So when you hear reviews like that, understand they may be a little biased, but at the same time, they can also give insight because if they start to paint the same pattern over and over again, Leadership never listens to employees.

Leadership's bad on communication.

You know, the hours are terrible.

They always make you work long, long hours.

And if you're looking at those and you see everybody's coming from the company but from the same department or similar position, then maybe you don't want to work in that position or that department.

But that doesn't mean the rest of the company is bad or the culture is different.

Because sometimes in management, there are.

In business, I should say there's culture of the organization, but then there's also culture of the department itself.

And in those cases, you have different leaders in different departments.

You can have a vastly different culture in one department than you do in another based on the leader or the leadership that's there.

So also understand that.

But if you look at a review and it has people talking about it and there are a bunch of different things, you know, you have one person working in marketing and another person working in accounting, another person working in the custodial department, and another person working in maintenance or, you know, and technology or, you know, just whatever departments are out there and they're all saying the same thing, then that's probably a pattern you need to watch for.

But understand that in business, the option of failing forward, or I shouldn't say option, you could say option.

But the principle of failing forward is something that can help you and your organization grow if you do it correctly.

Why because one, you train your employees that it's okay to take risk, but you also train your employees that when they make a mistake, take accountability, call it out and be open about it.

But also present not just what happened, but present a solution on how not to have it again.

That's a key indicator on how you grow forward.

When people can turn around and say, I made this mistake, this is what I did, this is what happened.

But going forward, this is what I either need to not do and these are the things I need to do, then they've grown from that.

They fell forward because they learned from that mistake.

But if they're like, well, I fell and I and I don't know what to do or what to fix, or they hide it from you, that's the failing backwards part.

Or if they do that over and over again and you're like, you know, Johnny, gosh, you just made that mistake last week and you're doing it again.

And then two weeks down the road and they're doing it again, then something's not working right.

And you still need to step in and help coach within those moments.

This is what I have learned within business.

It's something that has helped me build what I will tell you what I refer to as world class teams.

In the organizations that I've ran, not every organization, I'd love to say that, but in the organizations that I've ran, I have been able to build in many of those what I refer to as world class teams.

But in order to do so, I had to bring world class leadership.

If you're wanting more out of your staff, then maybe you need to bring or demand more out of yourself.

Guys, I'm so excited you joined us today.

I want to remind all of you to make sure to swing by our website@neal Reyes.com where you can find all of our teaching resources.

And also check us out on your major podcast host where you can find us, whether it be on Apple, Google, Spotify, whatever it is.

But guys, I want to let you know, as always that I believe in you and I'm cheering you on and I'm believing that you're connecting with your best life.

Thank you and have a blessed day.