Posted on January 12, 2015 at 8:15 am by /

Too many people in this world believe mistakes are bad. If fact, if you attended Our Lady of Corporal Punishment Religious School, you were physically punished for making mistakes. Punishment or a bad grade was all it took for most people to start coloring within the lines and actively trying to avoid making mistakes. If you like to color precisely, and your goal is to never make a mistake, then I have a formula for you: Do nothing, try nothing, and stay safely confined within your comfort zone. If you desire to be a great leader, however, the fear of being nothing, achieving nothing, and becoming nothing should be much greater than the fear of making mistakes.

8 Reasons Why Great Leaders Strive to Make Mistakes

If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying new things. Thomas J. Watson (founder of IBM) said, “Would you like me to give you a formula for success? It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure.” Any time you incorporate change into your life, chances are the new way of doing things will not work perfectly the first time around. But, if you are willing to make mistakes and fail faster, you will achieve success sooner.

Without mistakes, you lose great opportunities to express humility. People like to follow humble leaders. To be able to say, “I recommended a new way to handle this situation, and it didn’t work. I made a mistake, but I am grateful to have a great team that can fix mistakes – Thank you.” is a characteristic of a strong and humble leader that people want to follow.

Without mistakes, you will not realize your full potential. What stops you from contributing value to this world and reaching your full potential? Chances are it’s the fear of failure. Failure is necessary, and it’s all about trying something that doesn’t have a 100 percent guarantee of success. The biggest receptacle of great ideas that were never realized is the graveyard. What is your gift to this world that you have yet to put into action?

Without mistakes, you forget how to forgive. When you make mistakes, you have to be good at forgiving yourself. When you are good at forgiving yourself, you are a lot better at forgiving others for their mistakes. Recently, I sat in on the executive team meeting for a financial institution. The VP of Marketing announced to the team that he had produced a campaign that failed miserably. The room was relatively silent until the CEO said, “I am really grateful that you had the guts to try this and admit that it didn’t work. It was a good idea, and I don’t want this outcome to dampen your desire to try another idea. The next one may work.” To be great, you have to fail. When you or others fail, practice forgiveness and move along.

Without mistakes, you’ll miss the boat. There is a difference between missing the boat and being on the wrong boat. Being on the wrong boat is a mistake. Mistakes can be corrected, and you can quickly change boats when your mistake is recognized. Blackberry owned the cell phone market for business professionals. As the market evolved, they did not take the risk of making changes and adapting to the market quickly enough, and they missed the boat. Time will tell if they can build a new boat fast enough to recover some of the lost market share.

Without mistakes, fear will stop you. When you make mistakes, and recover from mistakes, you learn how to tackle fear head on and overcome it. When you know you can tackle obstacles and fix mistakes, you start to believe you can do anything. This belief is a powerful tool in leadership.

Without mistakes, you do not learn. If you think about your past schooling, it all revolved around taking tests and having your mistakes brought to your attention. If your mistakes accounted for less than 10 percent of your test, you received an “A.” As you learned from your mistakes, you improved your grades. As a leader, call attention to what you learn from the mistakes you make. The more mistakes you and your team make, the greater the opportunity is to learn what really works.

Without mistakes, it is hard to be great. Great ideas, great products, and great services are many times the result of a mistake… that is directed to success. Think about the slinky, penicillin, chocolate chip cookies, the ink jet printer, Scotchguard, 3M Post-it Notes, pace makers and potato chips. All of these great products that we take for granted today resulted from accidents and mistakes.

Playing it safe, not trying new things, and staying comfortable will maximize your chances of living a mistake free life. But if you desire to be a great leader, safe and comfortable playgrounds are not where you want to be playing. How many benefits will you experience as you set out to make more mistakes? I’d love for you to share in the comments what mistakes you’ve made that turned out to be great!