How are you making room for failure?
How do you make room for failure in your leadership practice?
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
How do you make room for failure in your leadership practice? When I was new to my career and leadership, I often painstakingly tried to avoid failure. I would spend enormous amounts of time thinking, planning, creating structures, and backup plans just in case something went wrong. When something inevitably went wrong, I blamed myself and tried to prepare even more! I soon realized that this process was not effective. I was not growing and learning about myself as a leader with this method. I needed to try something different.
Try not to control everything.
Try not to control everything, especially the things that are not in your control. I try to spend time thinking about what parts of each situation are actually within my control, not in my control or maybe within my field of influence. Elena Aguilar talks about the Spheres of Influence/Control and how this model can help us determine where to put our energies. Once I determine what is in my control, influence, or not in my control I can decide where to put my energy. I would rather put my energy into things that I have influence and control over rather than things I can’t control.
Make time to reflect.
Reflection is the most valuable and most easily tossed aside part of the process. Setting aside time to think before and after an issue can help you see where a failure happened and where you might do something differently next time.
Create a community of people you trust.
Who is in your square squad? Brené Brown speaks of a square squad, in her book Daring Greatly, of people you trust and who are honest with you to be on your ‘team’. You can write their names on 1X1 inch square of paper, hence the square squad. These are your people you go to for feedback and honest opinions. These people will keep you grounded in your integrity and help you learn from failure.
Take risks.
This is a difficult task for me. Taking risks are very much out of my comfort zone. I tend to stay in the comfortable and routine but this does not allow for failure. Risk taking encourages opportunities for failure. Failure leads to growth. This took me some time to learn. I still feel nervous when taking a risk, trying something new or out of my comfort zone and I now know that those experiences are the ones that I can look to as growth points in my past. These are the times where I experienced transformative change and developed new skills.
Making room for failure was not always my approach. I used to resist and avoid it all costs until I realized that this was how I was going to learn. Now, I look for ways to make room for failure and then reflect and learn from it. This process has created transformative growth for me and helped me develop and strengthen skills. Sometimes, I need a little push and it’s usually been worth the risk.
