Interview Transcript

I’m thinking in the context of the way difficulty can arise in quite predictable patterns in crises, in failure. How do you look at the role of failure as a vehicle for learning and leadership development?

I can think in practical terms of my experience of moving into a totally different culture and moving to India. Working in an environment where I never even visited the country and now, I was leading a team across multiple markets across South Asia. Needing to make some urgent decisions and trying to garner as much information as I could in a short space of time to make them. Then realizing my push to get those through and make some of those changes in the organization, some of the changes in our product positioning and profile actually went against some of the cultural norms that were going to make that successful. I simply hadn’t done enough due diligence or understood it well enough or listened long enough because I made my decision.

On the one hand, I felt great about the fact, I’d made a fast decision and there was concrete action and of course, you feel like you’ve got to make an impression when you come into a leadership role. On the other hand, I really hadn’t spent the time to listen, to understand why these products were not going to work and why the way we were going to market was going to fail and it would be a challenge then to how we’d recover from that. That moment, that pivotal moment of realizing that actually I hadn’t spent the time to listen to my time. I hadn’t spent the time to understand what I didn’t understand about the market. It was a key opportunity for me to stand up and say, you didn’t fail me, I failed you. I made the mistake. I didn’t listen. I should have spent more time garnering some of the opinions of people who had the experience in the market and I know you’re looking to me for leadership and what I’ve really done is sent you down the wrong path. It was a mistake. It was my mistake and I have to own it. Now, I think it was probably for me the most important part of me garnering the collective support and solidarity of my team.

When I reflected on it later, I probably didn’t appreciate the gravity of that moment, of saying, I made a mistake. Culturally, that was not something that was routinely done in that marketplace and leaders were put on a pedestal and ultimately, whenever they said you did, you didn’t question it. What I didn’t know at the time is, I actually introduced a new norm for leadership in the culture of that organization, which was be prepared to make mistakes, but also own them and be prepared to communicate them and most importantly, stop and learn from them and listen before you take the next step. Then if the next step was still not the right one, people were okay with that because they felt like they owned the decision, they’d been part of it and they recognized that leaders make mistakes, but leaders need to own those mistakes as well if they’re ever going to learn from them and become better leaders. It was a pivotal moment from me and one that I probably didn’t appreciate how important it was at that moment. Ultimately, looking back on it, it changed the way that we led that organization and it changed the way my team worked with each other.

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