Certainly, the more I became BOLD & Courageous, and in the process, committed leadership mistakes, the more the dreaded fear DISAPPEARED, and the less mistakes I made. I gained more courage, and personal confidence, fueled by a higher degree of self awareness, AND I am making my mistakes, without losing my self esteem, as I know they are LEADERSHIP Caffeine.
Leadership Caffeine: Mistakes are the Raw Ingredients of Leadership Courage
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.
. 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!
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