Monday Mentor-Week 21-Saving People from Themselves

For those of us that are parents, we realize all the oxygen we used to tell the kids to not touch the stove when lit was absolutely wasted. We showed them. We told them it would burn. We said it was dangerous.


They touched it anyways.

It hurt. They learned their lesson.

And with that transaction, leaders should see a valuable lesson in how team members learn and grow. You will never be able to save your team members from themselves and you will never be able to warn them of all potential outcomes until they try something and fail themselves.

Like our children, the most valuable lessons for team members in their growth and development is often failure. Success teaches some lessons but the ones that stick with us the most are the points of our failure. As leaders, we need to allow our team members to fail for their ultimate growth and development.

Now a special note to those who may think this is reckless. When the risks associated with failure include physical harm, loss of organizational integrity or credibility, significant financial harm or even the loss of a great customer, the leader must mitigate this risk and prevent horrible things from occurring. By contrast, if the risks associated with failure are minor, even when you know the team member is going to fail, you must let them. They will never learn and grow if you do not let them fail.

Another area of allowing failure is in pure job performance. You cannot compromise your expectations of performance and behavior. If you compromise once, you will need to be prepared to compromise often. If the team member is not meeting expectations, they are not meeting expectations and need to receive your best efforts from a coaching perspective. If they are still not performing, the failure is theirs and not yours.

Not every team member is in the right job at the right organization. Effective leadership is not about saving everyone but about making sure the right people are in the right roles. It is not a failure on your part when you have to let a team member go after the right amount of coaching and teaching. If they have to go, they have to go. Both the team member and the organization need this transaction.