If I sucked you in with that title – if your eyebrows rose, if your internal voice scoffed, “Yeah, right!” – then I did exactly what I meant to do.
If, on the other hand, you read that and felt a sinking feeling in your stomach, a knot in your shoulders, if your head drooped a bit – then you’re caught in the myth that leadership is a black-and-white endeavor within which perfection is actually possible.
It’s not.
As I said once when a workshop student asked a question – I don’t remember exactly what, but it had to do with a specific situation he was dealing with – leadership is a constant gray area. It’s endlessly subjective; it’s often more personal than we’d like; it’s profoundly individual.
And there is no such thing as “perfection” in leadership.
You’re going to make mistakes. Some of them might even be BIG mistakes.
And you’re going to get it right. Sometimes, you’ll surprise yourself by how RIGHT you get it.
If you go into leadership thinking that you have to be perfect – whatever that means to you – you’ll almost certainly end up micro-managing and making your people miserable. Or you’ll be so egocentric (because you’re a leader! and that means perfect!) that no one can stand to be around you. (Have I mentioned the leader I once had, who was a self-proclaimed “whiz kid”?)
If, on the other hand, you go into leadership knowing that you’ll screw up sometimes, you’ll say the wrong thing at the wrong time, you’ll make a decision that turns out disastrously, then you’ll almost certainly end up being open-minded, eager to learn, willing to accept the mistakes that other people make. You’ll invariably discover more and more about yourself and about the people you lead.
And you’ll grow as a human and as a leader. As long as you keep learning, you’ll be the kind of leader other people will want to follow.
Making mistakes as a leader is inevitable.
It’s up to you – as a leader – to decide what those mistakes mean and where they’ll take you.
This post follows on the previous two as a sort of (unintentional, but here we are) series. The first is Why Lead? and the second is And then there’s Power. Want to talk about it? Here’s my contact form.