A simple way to broaden your leadership impact is to give your team the opportunity to be wrong.
That doesn’t mean you actively encourage being wrong of course. You must still do all you can as a leader to ensure their success.
But many of us can, at times, become too risk-adverse when it comes to letting your team make mistakes.
A lot of leadership gurus will tell you a good leader puts their team in a position to succeed. Well, duh. Even so, having the best team, perfectly prepared, with all the right resources, will not always result in success. Knowing this, we as leaders are often paralyzed by doubt and hesitant to give our teams a chance to be wrong.
The old mantra “you learn from your mistakes” can be taken to an extreme of course — we should probably learn far more from our successes. But being wrong about something and having it blow up in our face is a huge growth opportunity.
Thus my point: we need to give our team the opportunity to be wrong. Let them make some mistakes.
A few years ago I was sharing a bottle of wine (and likely a cigar) with a leader who built a successful organization. He was at the point in his career when he needed to think about who should succeed him. A lot of younger leaders were being given more responsibility, and they were making decisions that (at least in the eyes of my friend) seemed headed for failure. The challenge he faced was sharing leadership with less experienced leaders, but not giving them so much responsibility that they caused a train wreck.
We talked about the worst case scenarios, and they were bad … but they also seemed unlikely. It felt more like my friend was reluctant to take a risk than he actually feared the worst case scenarios. I gently pointed this out to him. He grudgingly admitted I was probably right.
“Look,” I said to him, “we all know you have to give your team every opportunity to succeed. You’ve done that. Now you have to take an even tougher step in the process: you have to give your team the opportunity to be wrong. Stop focusing only on risks to be avoided, and instead see it as an opportunity to find out who on your team has the skills to lead.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes as we sipped our drinks. Eventually he nodded and said, “You’re right. I’ve built a foundation for them, but they have to make their own mistakes.”
“And celebrate their successes,” I quickly added. He smiled and agreed.
Now, making that decision is a step in the right direction. Implementing it is tougher (and context dependent). But my friend found the right way forward. Some on his team definitely made bad decisions, and it hurt the organization. But it was never a fatal blow, and it proved to be a powerful opportunity to groom others into higher levels of leadership.
Finally, I can’t post this brief story without a personal one. Like all married couples my wife D’Aun and I have often asked each other, “Which do you think, this one or this one?” The question could be in any context — what to have for dinner, what sweater to wear, what color to paint the house, which movie to go see, etc.
More often than not one of us would choose the option the other had not preferred. I remember D’Aun being exasperated with me at one point and saying, “So why did you even ask me?”
Before I could stop my stupidity from rising up, I replied, “To give you an opportunity to be wrong.”
Trust me, this is not a good way to nurture a marriage! Thankfully I said it with a smile, and she took it the right way, but it’s still a phrase you hear between us sometimes (often accompanied by an eye roll and dismissive gesture).