Leadership: "D" is for Develop

To develop into a true leader takes time. It also takes the ability to learn from your mistakes. As you lead, you will inevitably fail in some capacity or another. To learn from those failures is crucial to your development as a leader. When you make a mistake, you realize what needs to be “fixed” the next time you attempt a similar task. Therefore, learning the lessons of letdowns is an important step in the process of your leadership development. Taking notes of what when wrong and a possible solution that would have prevented the failure is a great way to prevent the same things from going wrong in future endeavors. You cannot get “bogged down” in the past failures, but you must analyze them to a point in order to learn the lessons from failure.

While learning from your own mistakes is vital, even more useful is to learn from the mistakes of others. As you watch other leaders go through leadership missteps, watch very closely. Don’t obsess, but do learn the lessons others can teach. If you see a leader make the mistake of not loving and listening to his or her constituents’ concerns, then you can learn the lesson needed to succeed by simply being observant of the shortcomings of others. Never sit in too strict of judgment on others’ failures, just learn the valuable lessons from the situations and remember that you are no more immune to failure than the one you are observing. Remember to learn from your own failure, and when possible, learn from others’ failures and develop into a great leader.

Never forget that you are either developing all the time, either into something better or something worse. Along the leadership journey, pull over and take a look at the big picture once a month to see where you can learn from the things which you have failed and the things that you have observed others failing at. You may be surprised to find out how much you can learn by simply observing yourself and others. Develop yourself and others…be a leader.