I’ve made a number of mistakes over the course of my leadership career that make my head spin and my stomach turn just thinking about them. No life or death or business impacting mistakes, but, definitely some people and team impacting issues that created ill will and most definitely didn’t show me off at my leadership best.
Learning from those mistakes helped me evolve my thinking on the role of a leader and on my true priorities in supporting my business, my peers and my team members. While it would have been nice to skip these speed bumps, the lessons are forever burned into my cerebral cortex or wherever it is in our brains that those things are burned on to our hard drives.
Somewhere along the road to making my share of mistakes, an interesting thing happened to my fear of making mistakes. It disappeared! And don’t misinterpret the statement. I don’t seek out mistakes and I don’t not (double negative by design) care about mistakes, but, I just don’t fear them. In fact, I’m more concerned about not riding on the cutting edge of what I believe to be the right thing for my stakeholders than I am about falling off and getting shredded in the process.
A leader preoccupied with the fear of making a mistake is playing not to lose versus playing to win. It turns out that developing personal courage is critical to developing as an effective leader.
8: Situations Where A Leader’s Courage is Critical
1. Doing the right thing promptly and fairly when it comes to dealing with performance issues.
2. Screwing up the courage to deliver the tough feedback everyday.
3. Accepting accountability for your own and for your team’s mistakes or performance lapses.
4. Supporting the person that you believe in to your core, in spite of the prevailing opinion from your peers or leaders.
5. Supporting a person that you believe in, in spite of the fact that she may not believe in herself.
6. Advocating a direction that challenges the traditional thinking (Prahalad’s “dominant logic”) while taking direct hits from the slings and arrows of, “We’ve never done it that way before.”
7. Being smart and confident enough to understand the politics of organization-life, and tough enough to avoid the traps and land mines that others attempt to draw you into on your journey.
8. Learning to say “no” to people and projects for the right reasons. “No,” may be the toughest word to learn in the leader’s vocabulary.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Writing this post is like cueing Sinatra’s, “My Way,” but Ol’ Blue Eyes had it right, in my opinion. You’ll make more than a few mistakes, and if you’re committed to developing as an effective leader, you’ll learn to quickly seize the learning opportunities, adjust your course as needed and move on to better performance. Here’s to our mistakes and the lessons learned as we develop our leadership courage!
Your right Art, it takes courage to face out mistakes and it takes real wisdom to learn from them. It takes forgiveness of self and others to maintain the wisdom that keep us from repeating the mistakes that hurt most. If you can look back with a smile for the people that have been in your life then you have been a success. and a true leader.
Hi Art,
I really like this blog post. I am currently in the process of writing my MBA final – a paper about the best boss I have every had (and why). I am really struggling with writing it. I haven’t had alot of great bosses. The best boss I have ever experienced had so many great qualities, but she lacked courage. Specifically, she never stood up for her team and often pointed out blame or threw us under the bus. It was so frustrating because she was great in so many other areas.
Courage is a leadership trait that doesn’t get alot of attention, but it is very important to the morale of a team.
Thanks,
Casey
Your first point is my favorite. I can not tell you how many times my current boss waits over a week to brign a specific incident up with someone. Half the time people don’t even remeber what he is talking about it really breaks down the communication.
Thanks for the post Art. Number 6 really stuck out to me. My company is just recently starting to open up to the fact that traditonal thinking isnt whats best for us right now as an organization anymore. Better late than never I guess.
I agree that there are situations that really challenge one’s role as a leader. As I transition into a leadership role, I find that I am slowly developing my courage as a leader. I understand that it takes overcoming mistakes and this comes with time. However, getting into the mode that mistakes are okay, it a bit intimidating. The absence of mistakes feels like the “safe” place to be, however I understand that as a leader, it is our job to venture into the unknown and put into practice change within our organizations. This can be uncomfortable, as oftentimes, the outcomes may not always be clear. A true leader has the ability to exhibit all the qualities on your list with the utmost confidence. I appreciate your insight, Art. Thank you.
I agree courage is definetely a mainstay in leadership. Not simply being the lion in wizard of oz, but like you say bieng willing to put your neck on the line, being willing to go against the norm. It comes down to courage, to being just, to being true to purpose not to a superior. It is the small details that makes people want to follow you and therefore develop good followership. There are so many small details that a leader must be aware of that it is essential to do them in order to be a successful leader. Your summary brings up a lot of points and disciplines that leaders must possess, and most of the time are not teachable.
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Making mistakes and failing is a fundamantal aspect of the free market as well as scientific inquiry . It is specifically addressed in classical economic theory. Everybody who has been successful in life has failed, but the danger of socialist econonmics and keynesian economics is that costs of failure are socialized and tax payers get ripped off, often intentionally. Risk should be privatized as under capitalism. Just like evolutionary science, progress is not linear. The problem in large organizations, whether public or private, is that failure is not tolerated. This is why an economy needs individual entrepreneurs who are driven to take risks based on potential profits. I am curious how much economic theory MBA students take. Von Mises and Hayek are well known as Austrian School economists who advocate free marget, unregulated capitalism . If you are interested in the theory of spontaneous order F.A. Haek had a word for it, catellaxy. Von Mises called his theory of human action Praxeology. How can large organizations actually protect and encourage experimentation? Maybe they cannot.
Thomas, thought-provoking on many levels. -Art