Jeffery Gandz shares his opinions on "Leader Breaders" and treating failure as learning in his June 30 Globe and Mail adaptation from the Ivey Business Journal.
Leader breeders hate to fail - but also learn to treat failure as a learning experience. With greater challenge comes greater risk of failure. High potentials, setting stretch goals, are going to fail and it is how that failure is addressed that will make a difference in developing leaders.
Where failure is punished or blame is thrown around, little is learned. People get defensive, avoid setting stretch goals and play in their personal safety zones.
There are, or course, some limits to failure as learning. Smart people are not expected to make the same mistake twice; fatal errors tend to attract more blame than those that result in less drastic consequences; and failures that identify personally unacceptable behaviours, such as laziness, carelessness, lack of integrity or personally self-serving behaviours, tend to be treated differently. This is acceptable within a leadership-development culture.
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