Leadership Caffeine: 8 Ideas for Navigating Your Leadership Mistakes

March 5, 2012 By 4 Comments

image of a coffee cupNewsflash: all good leaders make mistakes. A great number of them. Everyday. After all, there are people involved, and this would be really easy without the people. Fortunately, people are all that we have.

The true test of your leadership character isn’t measured by the number of mistakes you make, but rather, by what you do moving forward once a mistake is recognized.  You have a few choices: ignore it, deflect it or tackle it head-on in front of everyone and kick it in the teeth. With all due respect to my dental friends, I opt for the latter.

8 Ideas for Navigating Your Leadership Mistakes:

1. Admit the mistake. Quickly. While speed kills in most situations, it’s your friend here. Get out in front of the mistake immediately.

2. Resist your natural reflex urge to make excuses. Blaming the weather, competitors, the market, sunspots, lack of resources or anyone else on your team is only going to exponentially compound the damage to your leadership credibility.

3. Describe the architecture of your strategic mistakes and missteps. These are learning opportunities for everyone…not just for you. What were your assumptions? What data did you rely upon? How did you frame the issue? This re-evaluation is mental fitness for strengthening future decision-making.

4. Apologize. Too many leaders equate an apology with a sign of weakness. To the contrary, it takes genuine strength to look at an employee in the eyes and admit you were wrong and apologize. (Note the two parts…an admission and the act of apologizing!)

5. Don’t wallow in your mistakes. If you’ve executed on numbers 1-4 above, everyone else is moving on and so should you. Translation: once you’ve processed on the issue and captured the lesson learned, let it go!

6. Accept that you can’t fix people…but you can fix talent selection mistakes. Talent selection mistakes are some of the toughest leaders face. We all make them…but the best leaders strive to minimize these issues on both sides of the decision. Improving your pre-hire assessment skills is critical. And so is recognizing and dealing with a selection mistake quickly, fairly and with full transparency. This is too important to do anything less.

7. Seek out and stomp out chronic mistakes. The chronic ones tend to be communication, interpersonal or commitment blunders. From our annoying quirks…looking at our e-mail during a team member’s status meeting to giving short shrift to someone who is obviously seeking help, or, worse yet, committing do doing something and then failing to do it, those are visible, measureable and curable. The key to success: you’ve got to want to learn about these habits and you have to be willing to hold yourself accountable to improving.

8. Accept the implications of your mistakes. If you can’t handle the accountability heat, get out of the leadership kitchen. It’s part of the job.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

Good leaders make new mistakes all of the time. It’s the old ones that they face-up to, address and learn from that prepare them for those yet to come.

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Art Petty is a Chicago-based management consultant focusing on strategy and leadership development. Art regularly speaks on innovation in management and leadership, and his work is reflected in two books, including the recent, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development.  Art publishes regularly at The Management Excellence blog at http://artpetty.com

Prior to his solo career, Art spent 20+ years leading marketing sales and business units in systems and software organizations around the globe. You can follow Art on twitter: @artpetty and he can be reached via e-mail at art.petty@artpetty.com

 

 

Filed Under: Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Values Tagged With: , ,

Art’s Weekly Leadership Message: Always Go Beyond the Bare Minimum

November 13, 2011 By 4 Comments

“With the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had done more.”

Unless you’ve been cut-off from all forms of media for the past few days, those were the words offered by former Penn State Coach, Joe Paterno, as he reflected on his actions a few years ago in response to learning that a former assistant coach had been allegedly viewed in the act of child abuse.

We all face moments of truth…hard calls that define our lives and showcase our character. Paterno faced the toughest one of his career, and this iconic builder of leaders and promoter of character-based leadership failed at just the wrong moment. Or, at least he failed to provide the response appropriate for the transgression. Seriously, can you think of anything that is more valuable in any organization than the life and innocence of a child?

I don’t mean to pile on to Joe Pa. He’s got enough troubles.  For the rest of us, recognize that the most difficult points in our leadership lives are profound moments of truth that define us going forward. We either face them, embrace them and grow stronger from them, or we let them beat us.

A half-measure in the face of a profound moral or ethical call is a failure of the highest order.

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Want More? Check out Art Petty’s latest book, Leadership Caffeine-Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. Created for fast-moving and highly motivated professionals and leaders, Leadership Caffeine offers more than 80 short, idea-packed essays for the critical leadership and professional development situations in your life. 

Join the many groups and management teams and meeting/conference organizers who have adopted Leadership Caffeine as a discussion and development tool. The collection makes a great gift for the newly promoted leader or for your team during the holidays.

About Art Petty:

Art Petty is a Leadership & Career Coach and Strategy Consultant, helping motivated professionals of all levels achieve their potential. In addition to working with highly motivated professionals, Art frequently works with project teams in pursuit of high performance. Contact Art via e-mail to discuss a coaching, workshop or speaking engagement or to inquire about being a guest on The Leadership Caffeine podcast.  

 

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership Tagged With: , ,

Leadership Caffeine-Character Forged in Defeat

October 4, 2009 By 3 Comments

A Cup of Leadership CaffeineEveryone loves a winner.  As a society, we like watching and reading about winners.  We worship our sports heroes and we study and celebrate the great victories of history.

Hundreds of millions of people around the globe watch the Super Bowl every year, but only 5 or so can name the losers for the past 5 years.  We remember the winners that grab the headlines and the losers are relegated to the fine print of the box scores and answers in trivia games.

Winning is great.  It’s often the culmination of years of hard work, a relentless focus on condition and outstanding execution.  What high school or college football coach hasn’t hung a poster in the locker or training room with Vince Lombardi’s inspirational quote:

“I firmly believe that any man’s finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is the moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious”

It’s easy to lose track of the reality that most victories are forged in the emotional blast furnace of prior losses.

It’s the losses and outright failures in life and business that either beat you down or fuel your competitive fires to grow and improve and compete and eventually lie on Lombardi’s metaphorical field exhausted and victorious.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m definitely not in favor of going out and seeking losses if you don’t have to.  However, unless you are one of the rare ones that leads a charmed existence, chances are that you will suffer setbacks both large and small.

Your response to those setbacks is the measure of your character.

Projects will flounder and fail.  What did you learn?

People that you invest in will fail or worse yet, seize the knife.  Et tu Brute.

The life of a leader is filled with character building opportunities.  Our scoreboards and performance measures and quarterlies tell part of the story, but victory as a leader takes place over a much longer time than we are accustomed to measuring.

Hey, I love great short-term numbers.  I love the thrill of hitting and exceeding targets and the nice payday is good.  But those victories are hollow compared to winning the real game.

Your victory as a leader will be reported years from now, perhaps long after you’ve walked off the field.  Take a glance back and see what you’ve left behind.

If you’ve left a trail of people…professionals and leaders that are succeeding and successful and happily serving others, then you’ve won. Don’t worry about the failures.  They made you stronger, they taught you how to succeed and they fueled the fire that ultimately forged your leadership character.

Today’s challenges might seem overwhelming.  They’re truly nothing more than a momentarily obstacle or a misstep on a long road.

Take the time to face up to failure, reflect upon the lessons learned and then begin moving forward towards your next victory.

Regular readers know that I cannot resist looking to history for inspiration.

Lincoln faced defeat after defeat and a string of failed generals that left him the loneliest man in a divided America.  He eventually got it right.

Washington might just have the worst Win-Loss record in the annals of military generals.  We all know the outcome.

Failure can beat you down and break you if you let it.  True leaders grimace, feel the burn in their bellies and then laugh and move forward.

Laugh today and keep moving forward.

Filed Under: "To Do" List, Career, Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Performance, Professional Growth Tagged With: , ,