Week 12 – Learning Leadership

Adam Fike
Thursday 4/9

“Some leaders learn to lead by making mistakes and then reflecting enough on those mistakes to develop principles for the future…another way is to learn the principles based on the mistakes of others.”

Learning from your mistakes is a skill that every leader must have. Leaders grow in their ability to learn from their mistakes with experience, but this skill must be honed and developed from the start. In the beginning of a leader’s career, the harvest is ready to glean an abundance of principles from an abundance of mistakes. Sometimes, too many mistakes can overwhelm a leader and cause them to become paralyzed in a way. For this reason, it is important that a leader keep from becoming overly concerned about learning a principle from every mistake. Some mistakes are going to be made more than once. It is most beneficial to learn from the mistakes of others. A leader should observe and study the mistakes of other leaders, especially in related fields, because there are too many mistakes to be made in one lifetime. This can be tricky and sometimes difficult though because the mistakes of others are less real. A leader believes in the principles of his or her mistakes because they actually happened in their life. Gleaning principles from the mistakes of others requires more work and a certain measure of faith. Nevertheless, it is imperative for a leader to reflect on mistakes looking for principles to prevent them in the future.