What do you do if you want to grow as a leader by embracing failure and taking risks?

In my experience, stepping into a leadership role inherently involves risk. Initially, there's a risk of whether people will accept you as their leader. A strong leader recognizes that risk-taking is essential for progress, understanding that without risks, there can be no rewards. What truly matters is not avoiding risk altogether, but rather successfully navigating and leveraging it for success. Anyone can make a decision with zero risk, but it's the bold, calculated risks that often lead to significant achievements.

Let me illustrate this with a story: In a tech startup, the CEO, Sarah, took a bold risk by investing heavily in a new product line. Despite meticulous planning, the launch didn't meet expectations, resulting in a significant setback. Instead of dwelling on the failure, Sarah openly addressed the team, acknowledging the misstep and emphasizing the importance of learning from it. Sarah's vulnerability and resilience inspired her team to approach challenges fearlessly. They analyzed what went wrong, adjusted strategies, and eventually launched a revamped product that became a market success. Sarah's willingness to take risks and learn from failure set a powerful precedent for her team, cultivating a culture of innovation & resilience.

Here are some steps to help you embrace failure and take risks: 1. Understand that failure, just like change, is inevitable. 2. Change your perspective on failure and see it as an opportunity for growth. 3. Use techniques like mindfulness to deal with negative emotions that comes with failure and risk-taking. 4. Identify the causes of your failure. 5. Use your problem-solving skills to address these causes. 6. Accept that taking risk is a necessary part of growth. 7. Assess the risks and determine what's at stake, then plan potential remedies ahead of time. 8. Dedicate time to assess your response to every failure and risk, refining your approach for future. instances.

That's a good question. Failure is when you fall and decide not to get up. Failure doesn't exist in a leader's mind, but only comes across it in a dictionary. Leaders believe in winning and learning with no room for anything else. FAIL: First Attempt In Learning. Anyone that doesn't take risks and fail at least once can never become real leaders. Real leadership comes with so much pain and sacrifices. Do you still want to be a leader?

To grow as a leader by embracing failure and taking risks, it's essential to cultivate a mindset of resilience and a willingness to learn from setbacks. This involves creating a supportive environment where team members feel empowered to take calculated risks without fear of reprisal. Encouraging open communication and constructive feedback allows for honest reflection on both successes and failures. Additionally, leaders should lead by example, demonstrating their own willingness to take risks and learn from failures. By embracing failure as a natural part of the growth process, leaders can inspire innovation, foster trust, and ultimately achieve greater success.

You have to remember every leader has failed at some point in their career, and that's ok. Failure is just success in progress, and a chance to improve so you can come back even stronger than before.

The best way to measure an individual is to observe how many failures they have risen from. Failure, is one of life’s most harsh, yet at the same time the most necessary experience. It is what creates the highest form of experiential learning. Leaders that embrace their failures have the potential to become individuals that are more aware of their own strengths and weaknesses, acknowledging their mistakes and enabling them to do better in the future.

Let's view failure and success as two sides of the same coin, both existing with their respective outcomes. Embracing failure requires courage, a quality crucial for effective leadership. Rather than fearing failure itself, leaders should fear the missed opportunities for growth that come from not learning from failure.

Success is not measured by how much wealth you accumulate or awards you win but how you can bounce back after a failure or mistake. Failure and mistakes will come, we are human afterall. If the culture doesn't have true avenues to allow people to speak up and add their own creativity then you create a culture of robots that fear change. The world is rapidly changing around us and we need people to think outside the box to solve problems. The problems aren't going anywhere. Some people may lack the experience but they have the intellectual curiosity to learn and challenge the status quo. It's important for leaders to set aside time in the busy calendar to ensure these innovative ideas can get implemented.

"Failure" offer valuable learning lessons towards succeeding successes of sorts. You need to anticipate 'failure', embrace it gracefully and towards overcoming it. "Learning is a lifelong process", especially from the experiences of your own and from that of the others. By successfully overcoming failures, you can march boldly into innovative domains for job satisfaction and success in your career.

Set up regular time in your diary for reflection. This can be daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly… Each time: - Review what happened - Figure out why it happened - Draw conclusions about what you can do differently the next time - Record the lessons you learnt Remember that failing is part of success. Make sure you fail smarter each time.

"Personal Reflection" is very helpful for success and growth in your leadership profession. You need to reflect regularly allocating some time. You need to recall your experiences during "successes and failures". 'Reflection' enables you to understand your true self and identify problem areas for correction and improvement. You might have to modify your approaches and behavior towards succeeding in your leadership profession.

If a leader only wants to hear good things and can't handle criticism, their team might stop sharing honest feedback. This creates a problem because the leader won't know what's really going on. Some team members might be scared to speak up for fear of losing their jobs or upsetting the leader. A good leader should encourage open communication where everyone feels comfortable sharing their opinions, even if they're not always positive. This helps the organization, the leader, and the team to grow and improve together.

You need to communicate periodically with your Team and with other stakeholders on your experiences and seek their suggestions for your betterment. You need to provide a conducive work environment for your Team to express themselves freely and offer their suggestions and feedback. You can consider positive feedback to modify your methods and work style for your enhanced performance.

"Resilience is the ability to bounce back", from the failures confronted. It calls for courage and commitment as a Leader to admit to omissions and wrong commissions. Every human being makes mistakes. What is important is you need to learn from your mistakes and correct yourself and forge ahead with augmented confidence to overcome all your failures.

Understanding how resilience is created - by practicing failure as part of an experiment is a crucial part of this process. Which means, you have to start experimenting fast and in small increments. The more you do that, the more failures you're going to have. The more failures you have, the more you learn and the more you understand failure as part of the process. You start appreciating it. You become resilient.

When having conversations with your mentee on a "growth" moment, it's important to draw parallels from your own career. Be honest with them and give an example where you took a risk that didn't quite pan out and how you reacted and corrected. We all want to take calculated risks, so that we don't just go off in a direction that is not aligning with the mission and values of our organization. However, micromanaging a person too much is detrimental to his or her growth. Give them support but give them room to make their own decisions and actions even if it means it could take longer to meet a goal or you may have to help navigate them through the corrective action. It always gave me great satisfaction seeing someone overcome an obstacle.

Here’s a simple way to do it: Try New Things—don’t be afraid to take on new challenges in front of your team. Let them see you stepping out of your comfort zone. Share Your Stories—talk about times you took a risk and it didn’t go as planned. Explain what you learned from it. Celebrate action—when someone tries something, make a big deal out of it, especially if it doesn’t work out.

Leading by example includes empowering the team to make decisions. By taking a risk and asking great questions without telling people what to do, you’ll be surprised how quickly people will ‘figure it out’ by themselves. Asking people what the real challenge is will help them to focus on the problem. As a leader you can minimise the risk by being curious and staying curious.

One practical insight is to create a "safe-to-fail" environment. Encourage experimentation and risk-taking by reassuring your team that failures won't result in punishment or blame, but rather in opportunities for learning and improvement. Foster an atmosphere where team members feel comfortable sharing their ideas, taking calculated risks, and learning from both successes and failures. By establishing this safe space, you empower your team to innovate and grow while minimizing the fear of failure.

Lo que más me ha ayudado en este aspecto, es cambiar mi perspectiva sobre el fracaso, viéndolo como una oportunidad de aprendizaje, asumiendo mi responsabilidad y también construyendo una cultura de crecimiento apoyando al equipo y dando confianza para tomar riesgos calculados. También desarrollar resiliencia y mantener una actitud positiva ayuda a mantener la motivación, la inspiración y la determinación ante los diferentes obstáculos.

May I add that you separate the incident (Failure) from yourself. Don't personalise failure, rather view it as an inflection point, for growth. This fosters a more objective view, allowing you to learn faster and move forward stronger. Leaders who leverage failure, achieve greater long term success. Moreover, failures can hone your risk assessment skills. You develop an intuition, a sixth sense for what works and what doesn't, a skill only gained from experience. For senior leaders, fostering an environment that encourages calculated risks, not punishes them, is of paramount importance. Remember, valuable lessons for sustainable success often emerge from failures.