You might notfeel you can admit your fallibility and keep your current job, but we all know we’re not perfect. Of greater importance to a leader is the knowledge that your followers know you aren’t perfect, either, and they won’t hesitate to discuss your weaknesses and failures with each other.
Many leaders try to maintain an illusion of perfection, especially leaders in higher positions with greater visibility. While there are a few people who support this illusion, there are more people who will not ignore the lies and evasions necessary for a leader to claim consistent perfection. Those people still may follow a leader they know regularly deceives them, but they won’t trust the leader, they won’t buy into the vision, and they won’t be motivated by achieving a success for a leader they don’t respect.
There are things you can do to prepare for your next errors, and the key to your proactive response is humility. You need to admit, openly and frequently, that you will be wrong about many things. Again, everyone else already knows you will be wrong, so you need to join them in that honest assessment of yourself. The key to humility is recognizing and accepting an accurate, balanced assessment of yourself. Some people were taught that humility means you never can claim to be good at anything, and that incessant self-depreciation is neither healthy or productive.
Once you recognize your weaknesses, you’ll be better at teamwork, as you engage people who are better in areas where you’re weaker, and as you practice receiving and responding to constructive criticism. A healthy “inner circle” gives a leader more opinions and insights to a situation, and so prevents mistakes. (An unhealthy inner circle, with people who manipulate the leader through undeserved praise, multiplies the opportunity for errors.)
When you do make a mistake, deal with it honestly. Don’t make the mistake appear bigger than it is just to show off your humility, but don’t hide it from people who need to know about it. In most cases, don’t wait for the mistake to be discovered — bring it up as soon as you recognize it to minimize the impact of the mistake and engage the right people in addressing it. Do not concern yourself with being “fair” about admitting your mistake! Leaders who claim their mistake isn’t so bad because of some other considerations risk receiving the same critical scorn as we received as children when we tried to convince our parents that “everybody else was doing it.” If you’ve earned the respect of others, their assessment of your mistake will be more than fair to you.
Make a habit of these three guidelines: humility, teamwork, and honestly. Not only will this help you deal with errors, these guidelines will build your effectiveness in many other ways.
ADDENDUM: Since I now am fascinated by Louise Penney’s series of books about Armand Gamache, I want to include here his four things that lead to wisdom:
I don’t know.
I need help.
I’m sorry.
I was wrong.