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Results-Based Leadership: Harnessing Failure to Unleash Growth

How to Influence Your Colleagues to Achieve Shared Goals

Dr. Bailey practicing Results-Based Leadership

Leadership and failure are not often thought to go hand in hand, but once we conquer the heart-pounding fear of failure, we get our shot at mastering the hands on, forward-thinking leader we have the potential to become.

First, let’s define leadership so we’re all on the same page. Leadership is the “capacity to influence others to change their behavior in order to achieve important results.”*

We grow faster, create room for transparency, curiosity, & increased flow in the areas where we feel we can “fix it.” If we botch a project or stick our foot in our moth, it’s the ability to fail well that will help us bounce back. A failure-safe mindset is exactly what allows us and our team to think bigger.

As an effective leader, it’s essential to create a failure-safe environment to maximize productivity.

 

3 Questions for Building a Failure-Safe Environment

  1. How do you respond when something goes wrong? Do you minimize the other’s discomfort (to give them room to learn) or do you maximize the repercussions (to “teach them” how bad their carelessness was)?
  2. Are the necessary skills being sufficiently taught (and refreshed) to enable creativity and growth?
  3. Is the idea of a “growing edge” a thing to be recognized and rewarded (when growth occurs), or something to hide in the hope that no one finds out about deficiencies?

To create genuine results-based leadership, it is essential to learn how to effectively influence those around you. Once influencing is part of a leader’s working vocab, limitations evaporate and growth becomes a natural repercussion of simply showing up.

I regularly lead workshops to help teams and individuals develop the skills to influence change. Please get in touch if you want to unlock the growth potential of people in your work and personal life!

Citations:

Grenny, Joseph, et al. Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change. McGraw-Hill Education, 2013.