The Job of Leadership

The managerial practices presented in this blog are the result of many years of leadership in almost every kind of business or activity. That work began in 1973 as the manager of a retail store in Sturgis, South Dakota. I worked sixty hours a week and attended the school of hard knocks. I made $6,035 my first year in management. This was succeeded by varied positions in management and business ownership. I have been a professional management consultant and leadership trainer since 1985. 

It is the job of leadership to find those who are discouraged and give them confidence and purpose. Lift them up, help them find success by learning from their failures.  Failure overcomes us when it discourages us, kills our faith in dreams, in people, and in ourselves. It overcomes us when it teaches us to despise others and to hope little for ourselves. Leaders who lift people up are more successful than those who push people down. 

Resilience. It's the secret to leadership success. If you are able to recoil or spring back from failure, you'll go places in leadership. If you look at the most inspirational leaders throughout history, they all shared a common belief: they did not look at failure as a bad thing. They understood that failure is a ladder to success. Every failure encountered brings you one step closer to success. 

Why is learning from failure important?  We learn better from our own experiences than from others. And we learn better from failure than from success.  Failure hurts. It doesn’t make us feel good. It can be difficult to get up and try again. As professionals, we need to reboot and learn from failure and become a better version of ourselves. 

When you make a mistake, follow these 4 steps to learn from it:

1. Admit the mistake: It is important to admit that you made a mistake and be ok with it.

2. Think about it: Evaluate what went wrong. What can you do differently next time? 

3. Make a plan: Create a plan for how to improve. 

4. Try again: The most important step is to try again. Use what you’ve learned from your mistake to do better next time.

Leadership is such a mystery, a mystery of the universe.  Leadership touches the very heart of the organization. Each of us, who wants to, can be part of this beautiful thing called leadership. Leadership has been a mystery of man from the beginning, the one imperishable act of management, the act appealing most powerfully to the imagination. Promising solutions to the difficult problems of organizations by motivating, inspiring, and driving change.

Brad Hanson is an experienced management consultant, master sales and leadership trainer, and a keynote speaker with 50 years of sales and leadership experience.