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Letting Go

Letting Go: Embracing Failure

by Ron Potter June 8, 2015

Image source: John Athayde, Creative Commons

Developing your own untapped and unrefined potential is a bit like remodeling an old house: First, you have to tear out some things—like pride or extreme self-sufficiency or bullheadedness or trying to overcontrol people or ___________ (fill in the blank with some attitude or behavior of yours that makes you say “ouch!”). Today I’ll continue the discussion of letting go of perfection and look at embracing failure.

Letting go will often appear counterintuitive. Let’s imagine you are grasping a rope that is dangling you from a window of a three-story house, which happens to be on fire. Hanging on for your life makes sense only until the firemen come and are stationed below to catch you. Now it makes sense to let go.

Setting the Bar

Rather than setting unrealistic expectations, leaders should expect people to fail and be ready to forgive and move on. Leaders can help an organization learn from its mistakes and push ahead to new innovation and creativity. This idea has been referred to as “failing forward.” People learn from each failure, and the lessons learned are quickly channeled into modifying the plan, design, or strategy.

One of my clients is especially good at learning from failure. This man never seems to be interested in who is at fault but is simply interested in what the current situation is and how to move ahead. That keeps the situation positive as well as focused on learning and making improvements. The person who made the mistake or failed is not forgotten but is mentored and developed for future growth. Or at times the person who failed is assisted in finding another job elsewhere in the company or even with another firm where there’s a better chance for personal success. But the failure is always seen by this effective executive as a learning opportunity rather than an occasion to assign blame.

The irony is that seeking perfection and setting ridiculously high expectations is almost a guaranteed means of lowering performance. It makes everybody uptight. And people “playing tight” are mistake-prone. Failing may become the norm.

You don’t want yourself or others to become dispirited, unable to create or innovate because something deep inside whispers, “What’s the use? I’ll fail anyway.” The way out of this trap is to win some small victories so that confidence returns. Small successes, as they accumulate, can morph into large victories and help restore individual and team trust.

The Flashback Failure

Some leaders are stuck in the past. They may have won big “back in ’09,” and now that shining moment is enshrined in their mental hall of fame. A huge past mistake can have the same result; leaders no longer trust their judgment and can’t move ahead boldly.

Rather than dwelling on past mistakes, leaders need to use those experiences to create new and different solutions.

Do yourself a favor and don’t just become acquainted with failure: Make it your friend.

Get a Grip—Let Go!

Every leader is constantly making choices. Is there a way to make more correct turns at each crossroads we encounter instead of taking long, circuitous routes that cost us time and productivity?

Of course the answer is yes. In fact, once you grasp the concept of letting go, you will be well on your way to successfully developing great qualities in yourself and others.

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Letting Go of a Bad Idea

by Ron Potter June 1, 2015

In a previous post, we looked at bad attitudes that leaders must let go of to lead well. There is something else a growing leader must let go of that’s so important it has been assigned a category of its own. It is the enormously flawed idea that in making your way through life, only success is of any value.

The truth is that one of the most “successful” things you can ever learn is how to profit from a good failure. Let’s face it, reality teaches us that failure is inevitable. Since this is the case, we had better learn how to accept failure and make the most of it.

Image Source: mark sebastian, Creative Commons

Everybody makes mistakes, including great leaders. Nobody—repeat, nobody—normally gets it right the first time. (Most of us don’t get it right the second, third, or fourth times either!) Winston Churchill said it best: “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.” This was born out in Churchill’s own life and in his political career in Great Britain when he blew one assignment after another. Finally, as prime minister during World War II, he faced the greatest leadership challenge of his career as he tried to hold together a struggling nation under the constant threat of bombings, lack of provisions, and fear. Having learned from past mistakes, he rose to the challenge and saved his country.

Consider the record of several successful people who maintained great enthusiasm while failing repeatedly:

Babe Ruth struck out 1,330 times. He also hit 714 home runs.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Thomas Edison
Abraham Lincoln failed twice in business and was defeated in six state and national elections before winning the presidency.
Theodor S. Geisel (Dr. Seuss) had his first children’s book rejected by twenty-three publishers in a row. The twenty-fourth accepted the manuscript, and it sold six million copies.

Why is it that with all that is written about the benefit of failure so many leaders struggle to allow their people or organizations to “fail successfully”? The following reasons have been given at one time or another.

“It has to be somebody’s fault.”

Many organizations fear failure and make attempts to cover up mistakes or failed initiatives. To compensate for their fears, leaders often create a culture of blame. Something goes wrong, and immediately the leadership looks for someone or something to blame. Nobody takes personal responsibility; it’s much easier to find someone to blame. This is everywhere—in large corporations, small businesses, charitable organizations, government agencies, even in churches. If there is a problem, a scapegoat must be found to bear the blame.

Denial

Perhaps the most widely embraced delusion in business today is that it’s possible and even desirable to create organizations in which mistakes are rare rather than a necessary cost of doing business. The problem with embracing this fantasy is that it encourages you and your associates to hide mistakes, shift the blame for them, or pretend they don’t exist for as long as you possibly can.

“Small mistakes are great learning opportunities,” says Dennis Matthies, a Bellevue, Washington–based learning consultant. “They show ‘cracks’—areas of vulnerability—where you don’t pay the price now but might later.”

Too Tall of an Order

“We expect perfection.” Although most leaders certainly grasp the possibility if not the inevitability of failure, they still don’t like the concept. In their hearts they simply cannot tolerate anything but an absolute zero-defects mentality. They really seem to believe that if their people really try they will not fail. The leaders are either embarrassed by failure, too proud to admit failure, or do not want the “mess” that some failures can cause.

Tom Peters advances a more sane approach:

The goal is to be more tolerant of slip-ups. You must be like [Les] Wexner [Limited founder] and actively encourage failure. Talk it up. Laugh about it. Go around the table at a project group meeting or morning staff meeting: Start with your own most interesting foul-up. Then have everyone follow suit. What mistakes did you make this week? What were the most interesting ones? How can we help you make more mistakes, faster?…Look to catch someone doing something wrong!

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Blog Leadership

Letting Go of Bad Attitudes – Part II

by Ron Potter May 18, 2015

Image source: Hernán Piñera, Creative Commons

In Part I of Letting Go of Bad Attitudes we discussed Pride, Judgmental Attitudes, Uncontrolled Will and Stagnation. We continue the Bad Attitude section with….

Insensitivity

Insensitive leaders are unconcerned about others. They have no empathy and are uncaring. They do not listen—not because they are prideful but because they lack compassion. They are so hardened that they can unknowingly hurt people and kill ideas and creativity.

Compassion, on the other hand, develops as a result of treating your neighbor as yourself. It involves serving your employees, team members, and customers with empathy. It means taking the time to understand coworkers and team members. It involves genuine listening.

Dishonesty

Dishonesty involves more than cheating, lying, or stealing; it is rooted in deceit. Dishonesty happens when a leader denies reality or seeks gain through deviousness. It is about game playing, manipulation, and pretense.

Dishonesty always destroys the fiber of a company—regardless of how good the numbers are. Integrity overcomes dishonesty. Leaders of integrity strive to avoid the deceitfulness of appearances. They are genuine, sincere, authentic, and trustworthy—qualities that build the confidence of coworkers and employees in their leaders.

Divisiveness

Nothing can destroy a team or an organization like a divisive leader. Fear, anxiety, and confusion rip apart relationships and teams. Shared vision and values are trashed. Divisiveness can create an us-versus-them atmosphere that separates workers from management, management from executives, and executives from the board. It literally is war.

Great leaders build great teams where the level of trust and mutual respect is so high that team members can openly, and even strongly, disagree with one another and then work toward effective solutions. Confrontational behavior enables team members to fully explore and understand the differences. Then everyone knows that each point of view has received full consideration before a decision is reached.

Avoidance of Suffering

Leaders who avoid suffering always choose the easiest solution or decision. They avoid problems, responsibilities, and difficulties. They lack perseverance, endurance, and courage. They have lost the will to grow.

Leaders who are “avoiders” make decisions that avoid suffering today without regard for the future, and as a result, their people are always scrambling to keep things together. Leaders who choose avoidance completely miss out on the opportunity to grow through adversity.

Instead of choosing to avoid suffering, leaders who persevere will gain experiential knowledge and confidence. These valuable qualities can be passed along to benefit others in the organization as well.

That’s quite a list! Just think how your quality of life will improve (it won’t happen overnight) if you loosen your grip and let go of each of these bad attitudes. You will increasingly be a leader of influence whom others will trust and follow.

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Blog Leadership

Letting Go of Bad Attitudes – Part I

by Ron Potter May 4, 2015

Photo credit: Graham Evans, Creative Commons

Many leaders would rather get and keep a grip than lose their grip. But if you want to build trust with others, you need to have the ability to let go. The discussion here is not about delegation. It concerns letting go of personal qualities that build walls not only between you and your team but also within yourself.

Letting Go of Bad Attitudes

If you want to grab hold of the eight energizing, productive principles we advocate in our book Trust Me, you must first let go of some bad attitudes.

Pride

Pride is pure selfishness. A proud leader’s mind is closed to new truths; he or she is unteachable. It causes inflexibility and resists change.
Pride is a focus on us rather than on the development of other people. Pride causes a destructive competition between our team members and us, and between their ideas and ours. It forces us to fight for our ideas and our ways just for the sake of winning the argument, not for the development of the organization or other people.
The opposite of pride is humility. Humility is self-effacement rather than self-advertisement. It focuses our attention away from ourselves and onto other people and their development. It involves being flexible enough to listen and be taught by others. It means allowing other people to generate new ideas and supporting those ideas even if they fail. It is realizing that the whole team, organization, or business unit is not dependent solely on you.
Pride is a wall; humility is a gate.

A Judgmental Attitude

Another bad attitude leaders must rid themselves of is a judgmental attitude toward others—
Judgmental leaders are negative and critical. Inside they may be angry or suffering from insecurity and low self-esteem. The result of this kind of attitude is a group of employees and team members who are afraid to act.
The judgmental leader needs to learn to become a developer, a builder. To fulfill this role, the leader needs to behave nonjudgmentally. In order to do that, he or she must respect, understand, accept, believe, and hope in subordinates and all team members.

Uncontrolled Will

An uncontrolled will is a negative force that is rooted in a deep stubbornness and an attachment to personal (and immediate) gratification, mostly at the cost of the development of others. Leaders with uncontrolled wills avoid committing to common values or ideals beyond their own. Rather than a stubborn will, we need a focused will that centers on development, goals, and productivity.
Keeping our egos in check and our wills under control enables us to function much better as teammates and leaders.

Allowing Ourselves to Stagnate

Frustration, burnout, and self-will can often cause stagnation. Likewise, when we feel overlooked or feel that our work doesn’t quite measure up, we have a tendency to sit back and let someone else take over. Stagnation also develops from not being asked to contribute. When leaders take control of innovation, followers can simply give up because their input is not wanted or appreciated.
Common traits that lead to stagnation are perfectionism or mistaking activity for achievement. Leaders who are perfectionistic or are more focused on activity than achievement create a stagnant work force. People give up trying to achieve anything meaningful because the perfectionistic leader never appreciates their achievements but rather picks apart everything they do.
Rather than allowing themselves to stagnate, leaders need to serve and teach boldly and provide vision, goals, and assistance to subordinates and team members.

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