No one likes to fail. Yet most of us have been told over and over that there are great lessons to be learned from failure. We just need to “fail smart” or “fail fast.”

But is that true? Do we really learn a lot from our failures?

Not as much as we may think, at least when it comes to our own personal shortcomings, explainsLauren Eskreis-Winkler, an assistant professor of management and organizations. In fact, her research shows that we learn more from our successes than we do from our failures. We’ll look at this in more depth today.

We Don’t Learn a Lot from Failure

In their research, Eskreis-Winkler and colleagues have come up with some clever ways to test our ability to learn from success versus failure.

For example, in one experiment, participants were given a quiz where each question had only two potential answers. Some participants received feedback on when they got answers right and others on when they got answers wrong. (Because there were only two answers, both types of feedback let participants know what the correct answer actually was.) Later, when participants were asked those same questions again, those in the group that got feedback on its successes answered correctly more often than those who were told when they failed.

And these results hold across many other studies Eskreis-Winkler and her colleagues have done. “What we find consistently is that people learn much more from success than they do from failure,” she says. She was talking about failure on a recent episode of the podcast Choiceology from Charles Schwab.

Why is this the case? While there are many potential reasons, Eskreis-Winkler’s research has explored one in particular: “Failure is really ego threatening. It makes people feel bad about themselves.” In other words, we don’t like to focus on our failures—even if there’s value in doing so—because it makes us feel bad about ourselves.

Yet, learning from failure is important. So how can managers help their employees do so—and how can you get better at doing it yourself?

Here, Eskreis-Winkler’s research offers some insights. She’s found that while we’re not great at learning from our own mistakes, we’re pretty good at learning from others’ mistakes. So managers could help craft lessons by examining another team’s or organization’s missteps.

LEADERSHIP TIP

“We need to have a more nuanced view of crisis.”

—Associate professor Filippo Mezzanotti in Insight, on how innovation didn’t tank, but still changed, during the Great Depression.