Lessons in Leadership Failure

This is the outline for a presentation I gave at Toastmasters recently. It was to finish a pathway in their curriculum, but it also my life.

There is no lack of books, articles, magazines, and speakers about leadership. A quick look on Amazon shows there are X number of books with leadership in the title.  Ive even written one. But I would venture to say all of them have one thing in common: the writer thinks they are a good leaders and have this leadership things figured out. Although my topic today is leadership I don’t think I have it figured out and recently I learned a lot about failure in leaders and in myself as a leader. 

I was asked to lead a large part of our accreditation. I’ve spoken on this before that it’s called a Quality Enhancement Plan, whereby the institution has to pick a problem and construct a specific plan to address it.  I’ve had a year not to reflect—or not—on how it went and what I learned about myself.  I could share  lot, but in the time I have, I want to share four don’t about leadership efforts: Don’t take on leadership lightly, don’t assume, Don’t forget you are the leader, and Don’t think you’re the lone ranger.  

Lessons in Failure in Leadership 

  1. Don’t take on leadership lightly.  When they needed a person to get started again, I was asked, and I said yes, too quickly. I should have thought and prayed about it. I should have had a sit down about who my team was. I didn’t. But, . I had done this same effort ten years before and it was highly successful and figured I knew how to do it, so why not me.  As such I denied someone else the opportunity to learn from it and to succeed or fail. I committed myself to 18 months of focus on a project without really thinking it through well.  I don’t regret it; I just wish I had done it differently. Leadership is hard and should not be taken on lightly.  

Transition I began to have some concerns about my decision as we met every two weeks and I realized the personalities I was dealing with. All are intelligent people with good ideas, but all have different motivations and let’s say backstories. Which brings me to the second lesson 

  1. Don’t assume everyone is on the team for the right reasons. In fact, assume nothing.  Don’t assume their motivations are yours, even though they might be good ones. But those motivations can get in the way of a team process. My goal was to, honestly, make sure we were accredited. Some people wanted to fundamentally change the college. Others just wanted to feel heard.  Others wanted to get the credit for being on a committee for tenure and promotion. You see my point.  

Transition:In which case,  there came time when I should have and could been more forceful about what we were doing.  I needed to not forget my role. So, third point,  

  1. Don’t forget you’re the leader. So is everyone else a leader, doing leadership. Big difference between “a” and “the”. Everything rises and falls on leadership. I hate it, but if you remember everyone is in a leadership position  

            Sometimes that means saying no. There go my people I must follow them because I am             their leader.

            Sometimes that means yes. 

            Sometimes that means wait or compromise 

Transition: After a lot of struggle we came to a kind of consensus about the project, we put together the document and starting to get the pieces together. Sort of. The visiting accreditation team came and gave the verdict—the loved our aspirations, but not how we planned to execute and assess it. I was very down about it. But…. Actually I learned something else..    

  1. Don’t think it’s all your fault when failure happens. If it takes a team to succeed, it takes a team to fail. That’s is too heavy a burden to carry. It takes other people’s responsibility, and in an organization, there are lots of moving pieces.   
    1. We had a good response for our plan, but not our “assessment” of it.  How would we prove it worked?   
    2. The whole college had other issue we are trying to resolve
    3. Unfortunately, you might lose a position due to failure, despite the reality.
These are my lessons in failure: Don’t take it on lightly, don’t assume, Don’t forget you are the leader and the buck does have to stop somewhere, and failure is a team effort. Will I get another chance to lead a big project? Maybe, maybe not. But I will remember these lessons, and with them I will remember the old adage: There go my people. I must follow them, for I am their leader. 
 
Note: I gave this speech in Toastmasters as part of my pathway assignments. In a round-about way this expresses what I learned from "less than success" (partial failure), but more on that later.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reflecting on Reflection in Learning

Reflection is the subject of my next couple of presentations, so here are my recent jottings. Hopefully a reader can make some sense of them;however, the whole point of this post is that reflection can follow a structure but will not necessarily create a structured record. The reflection record will need to be reshaped to be palatable for a "judge" or "critic" or "instructor." Reflection tends to be framed negatively. If we dig too deep we will only find bad stuff; if we reflect on teaching practice, we will focus on what failed rather than succeeded. Why? Assessment focuses on finding the nonlearners and changing to get more learners, but it ignores that most of the students did learn, so why were there successes? Leads to burnout. Boud & Walker’s idea of validation not well developed but relevant. It is most close to critical thinking—testing it against other knowledge, theories, internal consistency, other data (other learner’s data) Ref
Read more

The LAST Word on Learning Styles

That title might be extreme, but this article nails it, plus giving some good links to other research. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-problem-with-learning-styles/ What is mostly important here is that we do know what universally works in learning (time, multiple modalities, application rather than rote, spaced out study) rather than an overfocus on "what makes me special."
Read more