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Have you noticed that our capacity to take risks is diminishing? Here’s what that’s costing us.
Most goals and projects are some flavour of aiming towards what is in the range of predictable.
A transformational goal must be something that we don’t yet know how to achieve, and as we support our team to move towards this result, an inevitable part of the journey will be failure.
(No one has ever gotten on a bike and immediately knew how to ride it).
Learning how to weather the sting of disappointment is as much a part of our growth as achieving the next goal.
In fact, being able to stay open in the face of our let down is usually more crucial than achieving the goal itself.
Typically, hen we’re met with failure, we create significance around it. We feel stupid for setting the goal we did. We feel annoyed at the person or leader that invited us to dream as big as we did.
We go quickly to blame, or to withdrawal – both effectively layered over top of our disappointment for how things have unfolded.
When this happens enough times without adequate support, our tendency is to harden and callous. Instead of learning to embrace this experience as an essential part of the journey, we get more judgmental of ourselves and others, and we start to protect ourselves from the risk of failing.
When the leaders I work with are taking on something new and unknown, the first thing we want to hear about are their wins. What were the benefits to taking this new swing? How did it go?
But the thing I’m really interested in are the breakdowns. How did things fall apart when you showed up in this new manner? In what ways were people unreceptive to what you were bringing?
It’s great when things go hunky-dory, but it’s more often a reflection that they’ve kept their thumb on the scale in some way.
The leaders that transform are the ones that have stories to share about how they fell off the bike.
So here are some questions to spur a bit of sharing — I’ll put a couple of my answers in the comments:
1. How do you protect yourself from failure and disappointment?
2. What’s the cost protecting yourself this way?
3. Where do you wish you would see other people take more risks?
1. One of the ways I learned to protect myself from failure and disappointment is avoiding social situations. I don’t have to be confronted with the fact that people might find me awkward or hard to be around, and I don’t have to feel let down by being in a conversation I’m not enjoying. Even better, when I’m feeling confronted, I’ll just avoid inviting anyone to do anything with me. No problem, I’ll just stay home by myself and find ways to keep myself busy.
2. The biggest cost is that I end up feeling pretty lonely. I’m good at being content by myself, and it’s… fine. But it’s not what I really want. I want things to do. I want to spend time with people. By protecting myself from what I’m afraid of, I get to stay safe, but it’s like I’m caught in a walled garden. And, I never really learn how to grow beyond my habits. I don’t learn how to be with people in any new way, I just learn how to avoid the failure I’m afraid of.
3. I’d love to see more organizations take risks on developing their people, and in particular, I’d love to see more leaders lean into their own development, before they look to develop their team. The cost is that they might have to embrace more vulnerability, and things might take a dip at first, as they set down what once worked, to create what will work next. But on the other side of this, we’d end up with more organizations pushing the envelop and creating cultures that inspire and thrive.