Friends of Dave #250: playing crisco twister
Sometimes failure is the BEST option
The true mark of a leader is when they are confident enough in themselves and their abilities to give their team the opportunity to fail.
As usual, I generally look for patterns in things that occur during a given week to share in this preamble.
This week, it was observations and conversations about the power of failure.
Failure is usually equated to losing. And at an early age most people get conditioned to think that winning is good and losing is bad. So therefore we naturally come to believe that failure is bad.
As a result people generally try to avoid failure at all costs -- which is completely understandable. We also don't like seeing others fail and will do what we can help other avoid the feelings that come with not achieving something they were expecting to achieve.
But here is the thing: the correlation between losing and failure that most of us learned early on is actually a distortion.
People gain valuable knowledge through the process of trying and failing. In so many ways it is failure that is essential to winning.
And yet, why do we do whatever we can to help people avoid failure?
It's probably tied in part to empathy -- we don't like the feeling of not accomplishing a goal ourselves, so when we can, we want to help others not feel that feeling.
It's also tied to how we, and others, judge us -- if you knew something that could help someone else avoid failure, why would you NOT share it with them or go out of your way to ensure failure was not an option?
It could be said, what kind of person/parent/teacher/manager are you to allow someone else to fail? Most of us don't want to be judged that way.
Think about it -- as we get older, this happens all of the time. We are expected to teach those younger than us to avoid the same mistakes we made along the way. It's natural. However, here's the weird thing that also happens -- because we don't want others to judge us to be failures in this endeavor, we increasingly choose to take steps to remove the possibility of failure from the equation altogether.
This is why you see so many young people today not being able to handle failure -- they have had parents/teachers/managers that have done everything they could to help them avoid the feeling altogether.
That is why I believe it takes great strength to stand by and let someone else fail. In many ways, it can be the greatest gift you can give to them.
By giving someone the opportunity to try and fail, you are also giving them the opportunity to learn valuable lessons that will make them better and stronger. They will ultimately become better at whatever it is they are doing by falling down, getting up, and doing it again -- no matter how much the pain of losing or failing hurts.
As a leader and teacher, this takes a tremendous amount of confidence in yourself -- you need to know that you have passed along enough knowledge to the person to help guide them and prepare them to perform without you actually doing the task for them.
You also need to be aware that, if you have done everything you could to effectively prepare the other person, their performance really has little to do with you. By giving them the opportunity to try and fail, you are telling them you have confidence in them. And if they do fail, it is their failure to own and from which to learn -- not entirely yours.
Finally, when failure occurs, you as the leader/parent/teacher/manager need to be able to have the humility to understand where you may have failed to properly prepare others and to do the work to recalibrate your approach in order to help ensure a better result the next time.
I think this can be the hardest part of letting others fail -- but it is also what separates the most effective leaders/parents/teachers/managers from others. They are committed to helping others learn from failure, overcome it, and ultimately succeed at their own pace. They know that sometimes allowing people and teams to fail is not only an option, it can be the BEST option....
By the way, you have lots of good options with the articles this week. Take a look -- I am confident that each of them will not fail to deliver. And if they do, I will pledge to do better next week for you!
Enjoy, Friends!
XOXO
Dave
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And The Last Word....
The Night Before Nirvana Changed Forever — www.theringer.com
As promised, Nirvana headed back to Axis that night to play an all-ages show. Admission cost five bucks. It didn’t even sell out.
Thirty years ago, the now-legendary Seattle trio played their last concert in Boston before the release of ‘Nevermind.’ Here’s a great story about a band on the cusp of stardom.
Related: I was actually in school in Boston when this happened. My kids cannot understand how I did not go to see Nirvana play live for $5.....I'm like, we had no cellphones, no internet, no YouTube, no social media, no satellite radio -- we just had local radio stations and MTV.....back when it actually played music videos.
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