Make it Safe to Fail

Have you ever seen someone’s spirit get crushed? I have. I can remember sitting in a fast food restaurant when I was young, when a boy at a nearby table spilled his soft drink. His mother immediately reacted by loudly and harshly belittling him with her words, and by publicly humiliating him. He was visibly crushed. If he learned anything from that experience, it most likely was that accidents are unforgivable and should never happen. He learned that, in his world, it was not safe to make a mistake.

When people believe that it is not safe to make a mistake or to fail, they will stop putting themselves at risk. They will stop taking chances, putting in effort, and growing. Instead of taking a risk, or learning something new, or stepping up to the plate, they will revert to a place of self-preservation. They do this to protect themselves from the consequences that could come with failure, by removing the risk of failure altogether.

We need to remember that failure plays an important role in the development of leadership. In fact, it plays an important role in the development of all people. For that reason, leaders need to have the right perspective regarding failure, so that they can intentionally harness its power for good, and a right perspective on failure includes three important ideas.

  1. Failure is certain. We are imperfect people, living in an imperfect world. We each have particular strengths, but we also each have particular weaknesses. We learn by experience. This combination of factors guarantees us that we will make mistakes and that, at some point, we will fail. You can see illustrations of this everywhere you look – babies learning to walk, teenagers learning to drive, students taking tests, professional football quarterbacks throwing interceptions, and countless other examples (think about this:  a really good professional baseball player fails at the plate at least 2/3’s of the time!). The reality is that people make mistakes, and this will always be true. And while failures and mistakes sometimes have the potential to be fatal, generally, failure is defeating only when you let it keep you down. As it has been said, “It’s not how many times you get knocked down that count, it’s how many times you get back up.”
  2. Failure is valuable. Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” Clearly, he viewed every mistake, every setback, as a learning opportunity. That’s what makes failure valuable. It provides an opportunity to learn, to change, and to grow. By implication, if you don’t learn from your failures, you won’t change and grow; rather, you will continue to make the same mistakes. This differentiation is one of the attributes that characterize leaders – they are able to learn from their mistakes and improve. However, the underlying context that makes this work is an environment that allows someone the opportunity to learn from mistakes. It only makes sense, then, that if it is not safe to make mistakes and learn from them, people will avoid behaviors that bring the possibility of failure, and, therefore, will miss the opportunity for growth that comes from those same failures.
  3. It can be safe to fail. Given both the certainty and the value of failure, it becomes important for leaders to cultivate a culture that makes it safe to try and fail, and there are three steps that can be taken to help ensure this.
    • First, provide opportunities for people to try. Experience is such an important part of growth and development, but experience only comes when someone has the opportunity to try – to lead a project, manage a task, facilitate a discussion, plan an event, and so on. What we have to keep in mind is that (like a baby learning to walk) people will stumble in the process of learning something new and stretching themselves.
    • Therefore, the second step is to have a response that is instructive, not destructive. Use it as a teachable experience, one from which they can learn. Take time to evaluate the causes and contributing factors, the mistakes that were made, and provide guidance that will ultimately produce greater growth, confidence, and development.
    • Finally, the third step is to give people a chance to get back up after they have fallen, to “get back in the saddle” and try again. The goal is that they have learned from their failures and become more competent and skilled, which will be better for everyone. And if they don’t learn, then you have; you now know that they are beyond their limits of performance, at least at this point in their personal development, and therefore you, the leader, can choose not to give them those opportunities again.

President Theodore Roosevelt once declared, “Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much or suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.” Failure is an important part of life. Make it safe for people to fail and then to learn.

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Interview Questions with Jonno White from Clarity

I recently had the opportunity to answer a few questions on leadership with Jonno White, from Clarity, in the “7 Questions on Leadership” series. Take a look at my interview questions and answers here! These interview questions give a small picture of what I have learned in my leadership experience.

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Quote Your Dad

Life, you’ll notice, is a story.” John Eldredge

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The Importance of Story

“Life, you’ll notice, is a story ” (Eldredge, 2004).  This brief statement by #JohnEldredge, at the beginning of his short book Epic, seems to have captured in six words the realization for me that my life is a story.  This was not always my perspective or viewpoint.  In fact, when I first entered my journey into a doctoral leadership program, I believed I was quite strongly a “concrete sequential” thinker with a quantitative view of data and life.  Somewhere along the way in that process, a series of circumstances, events, and reflective moments drew me to connect with the concept of “story,” and led me to much more of a qualitative understanding of life.  My personal growth had changed me to the point that I would now describe my perspective much like Eldredge did when he followed that six-word statement by saying, “Life doesn’t come to us like a math problem.  It comes to us the way that a story does, scene by scene.  You wake up.  What will happen next?  You don’t get to know – you have to enter in, take the journey as it comes.  The sun might be shining. There might be a tornado outside.  Your friends might call and invite you to go sailing.  You might lose your job.  Life unfolds like a drama.  Doesn’t it?  Each day has a beginning and an end.  There are all sorts of characters, all sorts of settings.  A year goes by like a chapter from a novel.  Sometimes it seems like a tragedy.  Sometimes like a comedy.  Most of it feels like a soap opera.  Whatever happens, it’s a story through and through.”

A natural outgrowth of recognizing the emergence of my own personal story was the understanding that “everyone has a story,” and so, in my development as a leader, I transitioned from recognizing the importance of my story to recognizing the importance of story in others, and in leadership in general.  I see this now in the simple way that I will often ask questions of people I meet to draw out their stories, and look for connections between their stories and mine in order to build relationship in a way that will benefit and enhance the effectiveness of my leadership. This importance of understanding each person’s story is, for me, reflected in the research methodology of narrative inquiry.   I have learned from Clandinin and Connelly, in the book Narrative Inquiry (2000), that story, or narrative inquiry, is a very important component of research because it provides the context and history of a circumstance and an environment, which provides meaning to them.  Merriam (1998) describes it as “the meaning people have constructed, that is, how they make sense of their world and the experiences they have in the world” (p. 6).

Over time, I have come to see leadership as a process that occurs within a context.  It seems that many approaches to leadership focus on the attributes of the leader or the relationship between the leader and the followers, but I believe that it is also very necessary to take into account the context of that process.  This includes knowledge of the context/environment in which the leader and followers currently exist (present); knowledge of the organizational history (past); and organizational vision (future).  With this knowledge, the leader engages in the process that is a continuing cycle of analyzing past, present, and future in order to move people and organizations toward a desired growth, change, or direction.  In other words, the leader understands that the story of the organization and the stories of its people are necessary to an understanding of how to shape the organization, which means that “story” is critical for a leader to be effective as a change agent.  Therefore, in order for me to effectively make change within an organization, I must first understand its history, and to understand its history, I must hear stories.  I need to ask questions about the way things are done and why they are done in that way, build relationships with those around me, allowing me to best empower and encourage them.  I need to share the example of my own story, and listen to their stories.

The additional, essential thing that I need to realize as a Christian leader is that my story is also part of God’s Grand Story (to use the phrasing from the organization, Walk Thru the Bible).  God’s redemption story, which centers around Jesus Christ, has been in play since the beginning of His creation, and He has been intentionally weaving people, events, and circumstances into His perfect plan to carry out His perfect purpose.  I have a part in that story, as do you, because God loves us dearly and has a part for us in a chapter of His great story. My story has a role and a purpose in God’s story, and so does yours!

So then, a “plot” in my story, so to speak, is that I have learned the importance of story for leadership.  I have learned that knowing my own story is vital to understanding how I lead and why I lead the way I do.  I have learned the importance of knowing the story of the organization that I lead, which leads me to ask questions and listen before acting, in order to better understand and manage that organization.  I have learned the value of using stories as a tool to effectively teach, mentor, motivate, and bring about change.  I have learned that everyone has a story, and each person’s story, in turn, impacts how that person constructs meaning from life, and therefore – in order for me to influence and develop my followers – I need to understand each person’s story.  And most importantly, I have learned that, as a leader, a teacher/mentor, and a change agent: story matters!

Clandinin, D. J., & Connelly, F. M. (2000). Narrative inquiry: Experience and story in qualitative research. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

Eldredge, J. (2004). Epic:  The Story God is Telling. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Merriam, S. B. (1998). Qualitative research and case study applications in education (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.

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Listen to the new podcast!

Leadership is hard, often overwhelming, and even intimidating.  There are so many different approaches and views on how to do it well, and so many different contexts, organizations, and issues in which it is happening.  Added together, this can result in significant struggle.  Often, we can feel like Solomon when his father David passed away, and he was about to become the king when he said,

“Now, Lord my God, you have made your servant king in place of my father David. But I am only a little child and do not know how to carry out my duties.  Your servant is here among the people you have chosen, a great people, too numerous to count or number.  So give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong. For who is able to govern this great people of yours?”  1 Kings 3:7-9

This website is intended to be a resource to help leaders with this, providing principles and practices that connect biblical truth with wisdom and applying it to the practice of leadership.  I want to connect those dots – Faith. Wisdom. Leadership. – so that I can help people lead well.  If you are new to leadership, or if you are struggling in your leadership, or if you simply want to learn more and grow in your leadership, here you will find counsel and insight to help you be more equipped to lead, and to do it in a godly way.   The goal is to help you lead like Ezra:  know God deeply, live by His Word, and apply that wisdom in your leadership of others.

I have added a new tool into the mix – a podcast! Appropriately titled “Leadership Ezra,” the podcast is all about connecting biblical truth with wisdom for the practice of leadership.  Aimed at Christians in leadership, including those who are leading in Christian schools and ministries, the podcast connects three dots of “Faith…Wisdom…Leadership” to help people lead well. Take a listen to the first five episodes here!

And don’t forget to order a copy of my book, “Leadership Ezra,” available on Amazon.

 “For Ezra had prepared his heart to seek the Law of the Lord, and to do it, and to teach statutes and ordinances in Israel.”  Ezra 7:10

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Quote Your Dad

“The main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing.”

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If Everything Is a Priority, Nothing Is

For years, my wife and I had envisioned having some sort of “mini-farm” in our backyard and had dreamed about what that might look like. We did lots of research into various plants and animals, talked about which ones we thought we would want, and even sketched out plans and ideas. But just as often, this led to feeling overwhelmed with what it would take to get started, and how much we didn’t know about how to do it well (and how to keep everything alive!). But then, at some point in time, we did three things: committed ourselves to action, changed our approach from “all at once” to “one step at a time,” and accepted the fact that it would take time to see the fruits of our labor. And so we entered into the world known as “urban farming.”

Rather than trying to start all of our ideas in one season, we decided to do only one thing first – plant a couple of potted dwarf fruit trees. We believed this would be a simple and low-maintenance way to start, so we purchased and planted two pear trees and an apple tree, and placed them on our patio. When that was done, we planted two different herbs in pots, and only after they were growing did we move on to the next step, which was to assemble a small chicken coop and purchase two laying hens, so that we could have our own fresh eggs. Once we became comfortable with caring for the chickens, we finally moved on to constructing our first raised bed garden space, but (like everything else) doing it a little bit at a time (in this instance, one 3’ x 6’ box at a time). Finally, piece by piece, in a manageable process, we started becoming urban farmers.

There are two valuable leadership principles that I believe we can draw from this experience. The first principle is referred to by #ShawnAchor in The Happiness Advantage as “The Zorro Circle.” This is the idea of starting with small victories and accomplishments, and gradually working your way outward to larger ones. That’s what we did when we started with a couple of plants and gradually expanded what we were doing, but not until we had experienced victory with each step along the way. We didn’t plant herbs until the trees were successfully growing, we didn’t start the chicken coop until the herbs were growing, and so on. The successive victories boosted our confidence and kept the grand vision from becoming overwhelming.

The second principle is found in the #VerneHarnish book Scaling Up when he talks about prioritizing priorities. In other words, if everything is a priority, nothing is, so even if there are many needs, in order to be successful, you need to select only a small number of those needs to make as your top priority, and only when those are in order should you move on to the next one. If every need is receiving priority attention, you will be spread too thin to manage each one well, so address them sequentially, one after the other, and not all at the same time. This also means you have to choose which ones to address first and work to keep the other needs from distracting you until the first priorities have been addressed. In our tiny “urban farm,” we didn’t give our attention to fruit trees, herbs, chickens, root vegetables, and other vegetables all at once, but rather we chose the order that would work for us and tackled one priority at a time.

I’m sure you can see how these two principles complement each other: choose the most important need and make that the priority, work at it until you see progress, momentum, and success, achieving smaller victories, and then expand your efforts by moving to and/or incorporating the next priority. One victory at a time, you will grow and accomplish goals, and eventually, you will look back and be pleasantly surprised at the progress that has been made.  You will find that you are maintaining much more than you could have if you had tried to start out by doing everything at once.

In my first year at a new job, this intentionally became how I approached my leadership. I first took time to listen, observe, assess, and learn, and saw the variety of needs and issues in front of me (as well as the plethora of good), and I knew that I couldn’t give my attention to all of them at once. So, I prioritized those needs and began addressing them one or two at a time. I shared with people the needs I saw so that they would know that I was listening to them, but I also shared – out loud – that if everything was a priority, nothing would be, so I would be tackling needs one at a time, and then I shared the order in which I was starting. This helped me to keep the other needs from distracting me, helped people to be patient, and built trust that I would eventually address all of the needs as they saw me accomplishing the first priorities. Prioritizing the priorities, and then achieving the initial victories, paved the way for a succession of victories and a pattern of growth and accomplishment.

You have heard the old adage, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.” The same is true with the tasks and needs in front of you. Sort your priorities and begin to address them one at a time. Achieve small victories. Move to, or add, the next priority. Continue the cycle. Your confidence will grow, your successes will grow, and your leadership will grow.

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Quote Your Dad

“Before you can say something, first you have to have something to say.”

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Words to Go By

As an educator and school administrator, I have participated in many school-year-ending activities, one of those being graduations. One of the interesting things about graduations is that – like many endings – it is also a beginning, which is why they are also called commencements (the dictionary definition of “commencement” is “a beginning or start”). During these times of celebration, there are often speeches and recognitions given that serve to remind the audience of where these students have come from and to challenge the students in their future direction. These speeches could be considered as words that motivate, inspire, and direct as young people go out into the world – or, words to (literally) go by.

Many years ago, when I was asked to deliver a commencement address at a graduation ceremony, it was this idea that prompted me to think of examples in Scripture that might qualify as commencement speeches. I started looking for stories that showed someone giving or receiving some kind of “send-off,” a speech or challenge that provided motivation and direction to that individual as he prepared to begin a journey of life or ministry. There were three that readily came to my mind. All three describe events in which God spoke to a person, speaking words that give us an important lesson, as that person was being sent out by God. It seems that God was giving words to go by.

The first example is that of Adam, who, as God’s first created human, could be said to be the father of mankind. He, along with Eve, had brought sin into the world, and now, as part of the consequence of their choices, they were being sent out of the garden. However, God still had a plan unfolding and wanted to bless them, so before sending them out, He issued a challenge (or perhaps a directive) in Genesis 1:28 when He said, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” God provided Adam and Eve with a calling to care for His creation, and to be a manager and leader over the earth. As faithful followers of Jesus, these words to go by could be simply stated for us as a call to do what God calls us to do, and do it well.

The second example is that of Abram (his name had not yet been changed to Abraham), who could be said to be the father of Israel. God knew the role that Abraham was going to play in the founding of His nation, so He spoke to Abraham before sending him out on his mission. Genesis 12:1 tells us that God directed Abraham when He told him, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.” God provided Abraham with a calling to embark on a mission as one chosen by God to represent Him, even without knowing the outcome or ultimate destination (he only knew that God would show him at the right time). Again, as faithful followers of Jesus, these words to go by could be simply stated for us as a call to go where God sends us to go, and be His ambassador.

The third example is that of Jesus, who could be said to be the father of Christianity. At this time, Jesus had not yet begun His ministry, and until this point, people only knew – by way of John the Baptist – that the Messiah was coming. Jesus approached John the Baptist while he was baptizing people, and John immediately recognized the Savior. Jesus was then baptized by John, officially initiating His ministry, and at that point, God spoke from heaven and said, in Mark 1:11, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” God provided Jesus with words of encouragement to begin His ministry, knowing the rejection and pain He would experience. Once more, as faithful followers of Jesus, these words to go by could be simply stated for us as a call to be who God made us to be, and live to please Him.

Putting these three charges together, I can say (and I did say this in that commencement speech), that regardless of where you are going in your future, where you are serving, or in what capacity you are leading, these are three valuable challenges that we can carry with us into our ministries for the rest of our lives. As you commence from this moment in time – as you go from here – remember these words to go by:

  • Do what God calls you to do, and do it well
  • Go where God sends you to go, and be His ambassador
  • Be who God made you to be, and live to please Him
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Now available on Amazon!

Order your copy of “Leadership Ezra” on Amazon (and check out the latest podcast episode available on Apple Podcasts, titled “See the Big Picture,” here!)

The work of leadership is hard, and it is not for the faint-hearted. There are decisions to be made, problems to be addressed, challenges to be solved, tensions to be managed, conflicts to be resolved, tasks to be accomplished, and numerous other responsibilities that ultimately have an impact on many people. And add to that the work of leading and managing those same people, who are imperfect and operate in the context of a fallen world. For the Christian leader – regardless of whether you are a school leader, church leader, ministry leader, or a Christian leading in a secular industry or organization – it can be even more challenging as you seek to reflect Christ in all you do. So where can you get help understanding leadership principles and practices within a biblical context? This may seem to be an obvious answer, but ironically, one that leaders often overlook: look to examples of leadership in the Bible.

The Bible contains a myriad of stories, principles, and truths that can be translated into personal application. The book of Ezra is one such story, and one of the ways it can be applied is to leadership. Comprised of two different journeys of return for the people of God, the experiences in this book demonstrate and illustrate lessons that can be applied to our practice of leadership today. The book begins as the fulfillment of the prophecy of Jeremiah 29:10-11, and along the way, provides examples and lessons that connect the dots between Scriptural truth and effective leadership, helping you to become the kind of leader who will make an impact in your world today, and in a way that reflects the character of God.

That’s the goal of this book, Leadership Ezra (now available on Amazon):  to connect the dots between Scriptural truth and life application, specifically within the realm of leadership, using a story in the Bible to do so.   I hope you can make the same connections to your leadership as you explore this newly published book.  But before you order your copy, open it up, and start reading, I would encourage you to first read the book of Ezra from start to finish.  You might be surprised at what God teaches you from your own reading of His Word!

Order your copy of “Leadership Ezra” on Amazon

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