Feb 14 2006
Current Leadership-Thoughts Blog: Exploring Leadership Failures as Opportunities for Growth
I’m convinced that one of the primary reasons experienced leaders experience failure is that, at some point in the exercise of their leadership responsibilities, they become detached from reality. They become incongruent or divided in their personal and professional lives. Often times, this division is never the result of some sudden decision or crises but rather a slow and surreptitious process over time that slowly and almost imperceptibly drives a wedge between one’s core identity (the place of uncompromised wholeness and integrity) and one’s chosen behavior to appease transient desires. When we become divided at this intersection, the decisions we make can easily lead to significant failures. These failures lead inevitably and inexorably to brokenness, pain, loss and suffering.
One of the best books I have “ever” read on this matter of maintaining and uncompromised core as a leader is Anthony DeMello’s powerful book, Awareness. Most people, argues DeMello, suffer from a chronic state of unawareness or “sleeping” to use DeMello’s words. They are either unwilling or unable to perceive reality because they simply cannot bear the message of truth that reality would speak to them. As a result, they choose to live in a state of personal denial and find themselves stuck in what Bunyan calls “the slough of despond” or a severely compromised state of existence where the more you struggle to extricate yourself from your own deceptions and unrealities the deeper you slide into them and the deeper you slide into them, the further they are perpetuated and accommodated until you are literally drowning in a sea of sustained personal deception and chronic fear.
You would think, as does much of the “business” world (based on the way the business world treats organizational failures…they tend to shoot their own wounded), that these failures are terminal failures. Now, it is true that some failures in leadership are terminal failures “in that particular context.” But they are never absolute and terminal failures beyond that organizational context. In fact, as I stated in my previous blog, these failures become the seedbed for incredible new insights and growth potential for any leader-in- recovery. More on this thought in my next blog.