By Rohit Ohri
Success hides cracks. Failure finds them. In the glow of achievement, an organisation’s culture basks in false validation. Town halls echo with applause. Corporate values beam from posters. Everyone appears aligned. But it’s in failure—when targets are missed, launches flop, or crises erupt—that the true character of a culture is laid bare.
Failure strips away the theatre. It exposes whether your culture is built on trust or blame. Do people feel safe taking responsibility, or are they too scared to speak up? In blame-prone environments, setbacks trigger finger-pointing and cover-ups. Fear of repercussions makes people hide mistakes, which only deepens problems and corrodes trust. By contrast, resilient cultures treat failure as a collective learning opportunity, not a cause for shame. Leaders meet failure with humility and ask, “What have we learned? What will we do differently?”
At Ohriginal, I often say: “Failure is not just feedback. It’s a flashlight.”
In one organisation I worked with, a product launch fell short. Instead of blame, leadership hosted a “Failure Festival”—an open forum to share lessons. The result? Innovation, not insecurity. People felt heard, and ideas flowed again.
In another company, a high-profile campaign failed, and the response was deafening silence—no debrief, no acknowledgment, just hushed whispers and quiet exits. Trust haemorrhaged. Employees learned failure was something to hide, not discuss.
This contrast plays out everywhere. Jeff Bezos has said Amazon is “the best place in the world to fail” because innovation requires tolerating mistakes. IBM’s former CEO Thomas Watson Sr. famously refused to fire an employee whose error cost $600,000. “I just spent $600,000 training him,” he explained. Volkswagen, on the other hand, is a cautionary tale. Under pressure to hit targets, employees became afraid to report problems. Engineers hid failures by cheating in emissions tests—a decision that exploded into a multibillion-dollar scandal. A culture of fear can breed far worse outcomes than honest mistakes.
Backing your people when they fail doesn’t make you soft, it makes your culture stronger. Teams remember praise in good times far less than support in bad times. When people know they won’t be punished for mistakes, they’re more willing to innovate and speak up. Ultimately, failure is a diagnostic. It shows whether “innovation” is more than a buzzword and whether trust is genuinely felt.
If failure shows whether your culture is built on trust, farewells show whether it is built on respect. And the two are more connected than leaders often realise.
The same fear that makes people hide mistakes is the fear that makes them leave quietly. The same defensiveness that drives blame in failure also drives cold, transactional goodbyes.
People remember how you made them feel when they left, not just when they joined. Onboarding gets all the attention—welcome kits, mentor programmes, inspiring emails from the CEO. But exits are often shrouded in awkward formality or total silence. Yet it’s the goodbye that leaves the deepest imprint.
How an organisation handles farewells, especially voluntary resignations, reveals more about its values than any glossy mission statement. Exits are mirrors reflecting whether a culture is rooted in gratitude or driven by fear and ego. At Ohriginal, I say, “Exit is expression,” because how you part ways with someone sends a message to everyone who stays.
One mid-sized tech company I advised celebrated departures with a “Final Mile” goodbye circle where teammates share stories and appreciation. Even Apple retail stores pause work to applaud and high-five employees on their last day. The departing person feels seen and valued. They leave with goodwill, not resentment.
Contrast that with the “cold shoulder” exit. In some companies, colleagues only realise someone has left when their email bounces. One manager described being treated “like a leper” after giving notice. The message was unmistakable: you are valued… until you’re not. That story doesn’t end when they walk out the door—it echoes on Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and in the memories of everyone who watched.
Leaders often dread goodbyes, seeing departures as personal failures. But turnover is inevitable. Every exit is an opportunity for gratitude, reflection, and growth. Just as failure can strengthen trust, farewells can reinforce respect.
Because in the end, culture isn’t what you say when everything is working. It’s how you behave when things get hard—when failure arrives, when good people leave, and when you must decide whether your values are real or just words on the wall.
The writer is Founder, Ohriginal
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