Integer Leadership Consulting

I find myself asking why organizational leaders tend to replicate the same or similar failures as other leaders who have preceded them? In other words what are the reasoning and/or rationale that explain the ongoing duplication of failures committed by those who are responsible to lead and/or manage organizations? To put it plainly, what keeps leaders from learning from their failures?

Resilience, we say, is the difference. As the argument goes, some leaders are more resilient than others…some are able to overcome personal and professional barriers. But, upon closer examination of the experience of resilience, we discover that there is much more to this issue of “overcoming” barriers. Someone can be resilient while at the same time they fundamentally resist changing the fundamental-structural issues that led-up to the need to exercise resilience. Thus, while they “recover” from a professional setback through resiliency (they scratch and claw their way back into the organization or to some position of organizational leadership), they remain unchanged at a deeper cognitive level which is the very seedbed which gave rise to the failure in the first place.

In my next blog, I will speak to the issue of cognitive or “schema” change as a key marker or signpost of resilience in leaders.

In early January, the NTY (1-1-08) published a piece written by Benedict Cary entitled, The New Year’s Cocktail: Regret With a Dash of Bitters. The article interested me because it speaks of the value of evaluating past failures, blunders, mistakes, painful-seasons, and gleaning from those experiences insight and wisdom for the present and future journey of living.

This stands in stark contrast to the school of thought that encourages individuals to completely disconnect themselves from past failures and move on. The fear, indeed a valid fear, that we can easily become obsessed with and emotionally/mentally fixated on lost opportunities, past opprobriums and other experiences of personal or professional regret is one that every human being confronts. Few dare to descend into that place of threatening self-examination. As Cary rightly observes, “Ghosts roam down there, after all, and they are the worst kind—alternate visions of oneself.” A similar “warning” is issued by Parker Palmer in his book, Let Your Life Speak. These warnings and cautions about descending into past experiences are not sounded in order to prevent us from making that journey but rather to prepare us for the courage necessary to, in fact, commit to those inward-downward journeys in order to evaluate and learn from past experiences. To be sure, we must be cautious of becoming preoccupied with our past false starts and stops, yet, as Cary highlights, there is great value in reflecting so as to understand and learn from what one failed to do or did but regretted.

For those professional optimists, positivists and purveyors of the indomitable and uninterruptable pathway ahead, this pausing to examine and learn from failures and regrets is anathema indeed. They see no place for looking over one’s shoulders. But perhaps this is precisely the problem I would posit. We are so fixated on forward movement that we reject any reason to drill down to the psychological and emotional substrata of those irritating…often haunting and loitering memories…that are seeking to get our attention by hanging around the margins of our memory. They must be allowed to speak their truth to us so that we can move forward with a firm resoluteness. Our role is to listen not to avoid or fixate. To keep that which must be learned and integrated…that which would make us better, deeper and wiser and to altogether reject the voices of guilt and shame.

Astute and wise leaders of others must create habits of serious self reflection on what has passed…..especially the ghosts of our past misgivings…not for the purpose of self flagellation but for the purpose of altering our thinking and our acting in a way that would make us more effective in our influence and our execution of the responsibilities of leadership.

Cheers….Jeffrey