Where Does Confidence Come From? Part 4

Confidence comes from knowing you are in process.

The fear of failure can be a huge detriment to our confidence. It doesn’t matter if we’re a rookie or a veteran, if we let fear of failure drive our actions, we will miss out on innovations, new products or new processes. As leaders, we have to face that fear and teach those we lead about it.

If we think back to an early point in our careers, I bet we can remember how we just wanted to avoid screwing it up. Or maybe it was later, when we got promoted or transferred. We were the new guy again and you were just praying you didn’t mess up. Is it possible that some of the people we lead are feeling that way today?

In his excellent book “Creativity Inc.”, Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar, said “It is not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.” That’s powerful stuff. Imagine the freedom they could start to experience if you let them know “hey, I don’t expect you to be perfect. I know you’ll make some mistakes. Just be smart about it.”

I’m not suggesting we create a situation where everyone can take dumb risks, screw up constantly and there is never a consequence. But as Marshall Goldsmith taught us, “what got you here won’t get you there.” We need innovation. We need new processes. Where does innovation live? It lives right next to risk. And do you know what is next to risk? Failure. No great accomplishment has been without risk, but if our teams are too afraid to try, we’ll never get those innovations. If the people on our teams are afraid to try something new, we lose.

We’ve taken a lot of risks at Next Level. Sometimes we swing and hit a homer. Sometimes we strikeout. In 2011 we launched Saturday services. The conventional wisdom was that Saturday services won’t work. Guess what? Saturday services did work, really well. So well that we launched a second Saturday service and it worked too. In 2013, we tried a third Saturday service that started at 7:30pm. It never really took off. I jokingly refer to it as the “midnight service” and we found out that our people didn’t want to get out of church that late. Who got yelled at over the 7:30 idea? Nobody. We swung and missed, but at least we swung.

Here’s what we need to understand leaders: When we fail, we learn. When we learn, we can succeed and this makes us all better. If we instill a culture that accepts failure from smart risks and learns from it, it makes our teams better. And when our team gets better, we get better too.

Application suggestion:

On a scale of 1 to 10, how have you been seeing taking risks and failure lately?