Seth Dobbs (he/him): Do you expect your team to get things right the first time? Do you give yourself little room for learning by not letting yourself make mistakes? Do you struggle admitting that you’ve made a mistake when it actually does happen? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential for helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. Leadership is a journey. The step we’re going to take today involves understanding that sometimes the greatest growth comes from making mistakes. Now, back when I was talking about problem resolution a few episodes ago, I mentioned that all organizations have problems whether or not we want to admit it.

Similarly, we all make mistakes, whether or not we wanna admit it. Now I had a colleague, Kai, really, really smart guy, really solid leader. He set high standards. His teams delivered some of the best work I’ve seen, and he had this reputation for having all the answers true or not. And I’ll assure you that that kind of thing is never 100% true.

He prided himself on having all the answers. It was part of his identity. So I worked with Kai quite a bit in what I think of as his middle stage of evolving into full executive leadership, and he was a bit of a micromanager. Even as his, his, his scope expanded and he started running an organization, working with customers and so forth.

He kept a strong hand in the work itself, and so he and some of his directs would get into pretty deep arguments about how to approach the work on certain projects. And I remember hearing about several times when after one of those arguments, the team agreed to take his approach, and then several months later when problems arose, the same discussion would occur, and the issue with that approach would become apparent.

He would question why the team was following that path. We’ve always talked about it. The other way is what he would say. That is the way that the team had suggested, not him, and he’d get frustrated. Meaning not only was he a micromanager, not only did he not like to be wrong, he actually had a hard time believing he could have been on the wrong side of the discussion.

So much so that his brain seemed to alter his memory to him always being on the right side. Now only a couple of the folks noted this, and they mentioned it to me, but the rest of the team typically felt like I was always on the right side, and that somehow they had messed up. They had misunderstood something that he was saying.

So this had a diminishing effect on the team and a few respects because even some of the brightest team members took the approach of just waiting to hear how Kai wanted things done rather than trying to bring their expertise into the discussion. And the number of people wanting to move into leadership was small, like near zero.

And in part because no one felt that they could have all the answers like Kai. So they didn’t wanna step up. They didn’t feel they could reach his level of apparent excellence and that they would just let him down and he would bypass them anyway. Now as the team grew larger, he was less directly involved, which was good.

But he still held that high standard and as he grew, he matured a bit, which was great. He would even sometimes acknowledge in hindsight that a recommendation of his was wrong, but he would quickly hedge with how that it wasn’t that he had made a mistake. Rather that he didn’t have the right information and that given the right information, he would’ve made the right decision.

Which with hindsight is, not that useful a claim, I think. But people bought it. And beyond that, in, in other interactions, he was mentoring several folks. But in that he would take the approach of assuming all those conversations with these people he was mentoring, really involved him, giving answers to people.

As opposed to say, mentoring. So while over time he evolved to not exactly a micromanager per se, he still set an expectation that he had to be right and that therefore being a leader meant not making mistakes, which again, made finding others that wanted to step up into leadership. Few and far between because no one felt they could hold that standard.

This concept is something that so many struggle with the need to be right. And I’ve talked about this from various aspects throughout this season, but for this episode, I want to introduce an enabling principle. We’ll get things wrong before we get them right. Of course, no one can hold the standard of always being right.

It’s part of what episode nine is all about getting to, but here we’re looking at it from the lens of how this impacts growth, specifically both your growth and your team’s growth. Think about it. How does it limit you if you think you need to get something a hundred percent right the first time you try it?

If you have no room to make mistakes, you have no room to grow. And as a model for your team, you’re modeling a standard that is simply unattainable. Now, in a study on workplace behavior titled Action Errors, error Management and Learning and Organizations by Michael Freeze and Nina Keith, they found that learning from mistakes is actually essential in growing in a learning organization.

But I’ll say that this only works in an environment where mistakes are possible. If you’re struggling with this, there’s some simple changes to make, and that is to allow yourself and others to make mistakes and admit it publicly, openly when you’ve made one. Use it as an opportunity to make changes, to make improvements, to refine your principles, rather than just making it about shame and blame.

The startup concept around fail fast is actually based on this concept as well. It’s an admission that they’re not gonna get things right the first time. But if we go a little deeper on that concept. We should think about what right really means. Redefining right means centering on outcomes rather than what was done or how something was done.

It’s not about did you do something right or wrong, but did you have the right understanding of the situation and the right principles to guide you? And if not, how could you have had a better understanding or what principles might need to change? And most importantly, from where you are in the moment, how do you get back to forward motion to the outcomes you’re trying to achieve?

Now at the same time that I was working with Kai, I worked with another leader, Tessa. Her approach was a bit different and her team’s behavior gives a really good indicator as to what the signs to look for are when applying. The principle will get things wrong before we get them right. Her team was considerably more innovative, considerably more risk taking.

In fact, her team had a reputation for being big thinkers and many suspected she just hired for that. But in getting to know both teams, I’ll say that they were equally extraordinary talent in both of them. But the difference was when I spoke to Tessa’s team members. ’cause I’d hear things like, oh yeah, I know I can try something new, make a mistake.

Because Tessa always admits when she’s made a mistake and shows how she works through it or things like, I know I have support in trying something different. I’ve seen how she handles herself. I know she’s gonna support me in the same way. That’s really powerful. That’s really unlocking the potential of your team when your team knows that you all can get something wrong before you’ll get it right.

It means you have the space for continual learning and growth. And Tess’s team as a result of this, had more burgeoning leaders than Kai’s, and that’s a lot of what this principle gets down to. Giving people, including yourself, the space to grow. This concept brings together much of what I’ve discussed throughout this season.

It helps support the notion that leadership’s not about being right, but getting to right and that in doing so, you might make some mistakes along the way. Doing this gets easier when you develop a bias to outcomes because your team’s work becomes less about right and wrong answers, and instead shifts focus to achieving things.

And ultimately being able to do this, being able to admit mistakes is often the hardest reality to face. But modeling that it’s okay to make mistakes that you can get things wrong before you get them right, lets others see that and do that as well. That helps create autonomy because people aren’t worried about whether or not you like something, but whether or not it’s moving things forward and doing this aligned with your vision means that growth and learning is headed somewhere important for the organization and the individuals really enabling everyone to thrive.

All of this together helps you create more leaders in your organization. So let’s face it. Whether you like it or not, your team and your peers recognize when you make a mistake and they’re talking about it. Not admitting it to yourself can actually be de destructive on multiple fronts, not the least of which is your credibility.

But if you expect to run an organization with no room for errors, your team’s not gonna be innovative. They’re not gonna deliver great results. They’re not gonna reach their highest collective aspirations. I actually think sometimes the notion of flawless delivery and innovation are competing forces because if you focus on some concept of being flawless, perfect on having no room for errors, your team’s gonna go through the motion, but afraid to take risks and inertia will set in fast.

They’re gonna be more afraid to step up, more, afraid to try something new and different. We all make mistakes. We have to have an organization. We have to have the systems, the methods that take that into account rather than to try to make it impossible to happen. And as a leader, you’re a model. You have to give yourself and the people you lead the grace to learn and grow, both through success.

And through making mistakes, and honestly, I think you can be successful simply through sheer luck sometimes. But when you make a mistake, you’re much more likely to take the time to analyze and address. And in doing so, you’re gonna learn something that improves you. You might learn new principles to apply in the future or make refinements in how you guide yourself.

And the same goes for the folks that you lead. Use this as an opportunity to help them refine what guides them in making their decisions. So I want you to think about, do you give yourself and others the space to make mistakes? And if not, how can you reframe your next set of interactions with your team to start creating that space today?

Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend if you liked it, and join me next time where I’m going to talk about empowerment.