LEADERS MAKE MISTAKES: BIG ONES, AND LOTS OF 'EM
One of my recently acquired leisure activities is reading biographies of great leaders. I want to be a great leader, and I feel like the more biographies I read, the greater insight I can have into the life and mind of great leadership. One of the things I've noticed in these biographies is that leaders make mistakes. Big ones, and lots of 'em. Their lives are often boiled down to about a handful of decisions each year, and maybe they get half to two-thirds of them right. There are often high proportions of followers, sometimes even more than half, that don't like them.
This is at once freeing and distressing for me to discover. On the one hand, if I am honest with myself, I admit that I want to be perfect, and I want everyone to like me. But on the other hand, it is wonderfully liberating to know great leaders don't have to be perfect, nor do they have to be liked by everyone. If I look back on 2003, I'll probably remember 5-10 major decisions I had to make. And if I get three out of five good, or seven out of ten, that's a good year.
I thought of this today because we concluded our three-day business camp for young entrepreneurs. This is the tenth such camp we've done in the past five years, and the first that I didn't run; my interim director took charge on this one. The first nine that I was in charge of, I drove myself and my team to eliminate any errors. I had this down to the minutae of detail; I didn't want to leave any stone unturned in preparing the perfect camp for these youth. If we took care of 98 out of 100 things on a given day, I would remember the two we missed, so that we didn't forget next time.
This time around, though, I was just another volunteer. Someone else was running the show; I was just sitting at a table, working with the five or six kids on my team. And every so often, I caught a mistake: a typo in the curriculum binder, a scheduling of activities that I didn't agree with, an activity that took too long. And I was OK with it. The event went on, even if it didn't go exactly as we had planned it, and even if something happened that we hadn't anticipated.
My new perspective on business camps, I feel, has been flavored by my insight from these biographies: leadership isn't about getting 100 out of 100; it's about distilling your decision-making focus to four or five things, and then getting at least two or three of those right. To be sure, details are important: it's not like the leader is too important to fuss with such lowly things. Rather, I'm learning I can be free to have just a few things on my mind, not hundreds, and that I can make a lot of mistakes, even big ones, and even ones that make people unhappy with me. How liberating!
One of my recently acquired leisure activities is reading biographies of great leaders. I want to be a great leader, and I feel like the more biographies I read, the greater insight I can have into the life and mind of great leadership. One of the things I've noticed in these biographies is that leaders make mistakes. Big ones, and lots of 'em. Their lives are often boiled down to about a handful of decisions each year, and maybe they get half to two-thirds of them right. There are often high proportions of followers, sometimes even more than half, that don't like them.
This is at once freeing and distressing for me to discover. On the one hand, if I am honest with myself, I admit that I want to be perfect, and I want everyone to like me. But on the other hand, it is wonderfully liberating to know great leaders don't have to be perfect, nor do they have to be liked by everyone. If I look back on 2003, I'll probably remember 5-10 major decisions I had to make. And if I get three out of five good, or seven out of ten, that's a good year.
I thought of this today because we concluded our three-day business camp for young entrepreneurs. This is the tenth such camp we've done in the past five years, and the first that I didn't run; my interim director took charge on this one. The first nine that I was in charge of, I drove myself and my team to eliminate any errors. I had this down to the minutae of detail; I didn't want to leave any stone unturned in preparing the perfect camp for these youth. If we took care of 98 out of 100 things on a given day, I would remember the two we missed, so that we didn't forget next time.
This time around, though, I was just another volunteer. Someone else was running the show; I was just sitting at a table, working with the five or six kids on my team. And every so often, I caught a mistake: a typo in the curriculum binder, a scheduling of activities that I didn't agree with, an activity that took too long. And I was OK with it. The event went on, even if it didn't go exactly as we had planned it, and even if something happened that we hadn't anticipated.
My new perspective on business camps, I feel, has been flavored by my insight from these biographies: leadership isn't about getting 100 out of 100; it's about distilling your decision-making focus to four or five things, and then getting at least two or three of those right. To be sure, details are important: it's not like the leader is too important to fuss with such lowly things. Rather, I'm learning I can be free to have just a few things on my mind, not hundreds, and that I can make a lot of mistakes, even big ones, and even ones that make people unhappy with me. How liberating!
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