Pendle hill is the home of the Lancashire witches.
Leadership is
Gained Through Failure: How Great Leaders Are Losers Too.
Karima Hana-Meksem,
I often think about how society wrongly puts success and
leadership on an invisible pedestal.
I often fear that our children already view success
and leadership as a road
full of glamorous victories and spotlights. I often
regret how easy it is for us to label people
as leaders or losers without any second thoughts. Who are
we to constantly make
this fatal judgement? Everybody should have a voice and a
purpose,
but sometime we consciously or unconsciously rob people
from their own precious voice.
I sometimes think back to some of my former high school
classmates and how their life
would have been different if they had not been exposed to
this drastic culture
of winners and losers; this ruthless culture of leaders
vs. losers.
This culture of leadership does not accept losing as part of the hallmark of humanity;
in other words, it
does not accept losing as part of the essence of leadership.
Indeed, from our earliest years to adulthood we learn
that the only way to succeed
is to aggressively compete and to be a winner at all
costs.
Every day, we are facing more and more competitiveness at
school, work and at home.
Does leadership always have to be about victory though?
We all know how difficult it is to explain to our
children that losing is a normal part of the game, because they are used to
this dangerous idea of always winning even if it causes
them to cheat.
Leadership starts at home and at school,
and this is where we should encourage
children and adults to learn that losing
is part of the essence of
leadership itself.
We Are All Leaders Who Can Lose
Obviously, I do not know one single person who loves
losing or failing, however by accepting
the notion that leadership is also about, mistakes, failures
and lost battles, we will also be able
to accept the responsibility of losing as a main part of
our leadership identity. To tell the truth, taking responsibility for a failure
is a hard thing to accomplish, but it undeniably reveals
the leader we truly are. We all know how easy it is to
own a victory
and share it with the whole world, but it takes strength
and character to acknowledge a failure.
In fact, just one of our failures will undercover who we
really are as leaders, compared to many
loud victories that will tell us so little about
ourselves. We should undercover our self-control
and ability to cope with a lost battle. As bitter,
painful and frustrating it could be,
a failure will reveal our true leadership and our
gracefulness.
The elegance of our actions in a situation considered a
failure will show our abilities as a leader
and how we are still able to lead when the glamour and
spotlights are gone.
The ultimate challenge of losing or failing is how we are
able to respond to this kind of event. Actually, every difficult time is a
great opportunity for us to learn how to better ourselves.
In truth, failures and defeats teach us a great deal of
humility, grace and empathy.
We have to learn from these situations considered defeats
to be able to help ourselves
and others. We have to embrace our failures, move
past them,
and allow ourselves to be stronger and better than who we
were.
We were all taught how to succeed, but not how to face a
failure that will inevitably happen
one day. By learning how to deal with a failure in a
positive way,
we will develop our resilience and adaptability to better
face unusual situations.
We must realize that the fear of failure holds us back
and limits how much we can achieve.
Let's embrace failure in order to truly succeed. The next
time we feel the need to label someone
as a loser, we should remind ourselves that sometimes we
can be losers too,
but what really matters is how we are able to cope with a
failure and help ourselves and others
to rebound. The moral of this is to not give up and to be
able to learn from these life lessons
in order to move on. Failure is an important part of our
development as leaders
and should not be hidden. I deeply believe that everybody
is a leader,
a unique human being, who faces victories and defeats.
KHM
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/leadership-gained-through-failure-how-great-leaders-hana-meksem-phd
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