publication date: Sep 27, 2012
The following
article is a brief excerpt from Hilborn's premium publication, Gift Planning
in Canada.
Leadership consultant
Glenn Llopis has made a career-long study
of the relationship between failure and leadership success. The best leaders,
he says, sometimes fail - but they learn from their failures.
Failure, he continues, can teach you how to manage adversity, why
opportunities didn't pan out, which relationships could have fuelled your own
progress and your organization's goals if you'd only developed them properly.
He offers these tips to help you make the most of your failures.
Confront your
failure and learn from it. Failure hurts. But instead of running away from it
or masking it, face it boldly. Figure out what you could have done better,
Llopis urges. Get feedback from anyone else who was involved.
Build a better
team. After you've identified your own part in the failure, look at the
organizational systems, processes and assumptions that might need improving.
Get others to work with you to improve systems and processes and change
assumptions.
Trust yourself
and make more decisions. Once you've understood why you've failed, Llopis
says, you might realize you weren't that far from success. Now you have two
lessons to guide your future decisions: what didn't work, and what would have
worked.
Second chances
abound. Llopis describes failure as "a wake-up call for the next opportunity."
Failure can teach you to identify second chances and hidden opportunities.
Appreciate your
responsibilities. Anything that
makes you better at your role - including learning from your failures - sets
you up for a greater positive effect on everyone within your sphere of
influence, Llopis claims.
Hilborn's Janet Gadeski analyses Llopis' ideas on
failure and leadership in this month's issue of Hilborn's premium publication, Gift Planning in Canada. You can
receive thought-provoking, leadership-focused articles like these each month by
subscribing. We spend a lot of time researching and sifting ideas so you don't
have to!
