When I moved from leading one team to leading multiple distinct teams, with different kinds of responsibilities, one major mistake was fundamental in triggering most of the other mistakes I made.
I had this idea that it was my previous success that earned me my expanded leadership role. And because of that, I believed that keeping my new role depended on my ability to demonstrate continued success.
That belief led me to try to learn all the skills of the technical experts in each team. It pushed me to stay highly involved in the detailed planning of every project. It drove me to rush in and rescue projects before they could veer too far off course.
And that craving for success led to my biggest failures. My job was not just to have projects that succeeded. An even greater responsibility was to have people who succeeded.
But by constraining them so much that I thought they couldn’t fail, I took away their opportunities to grow and, ultimately, to succeed.
Fortunately, I had a good mentor who called me out and said, “Steve, to be successful long-term, you have to be willing to let your team fail sometimes.” And that mentor was also my boss. And he was willing to tell me that even knowing that a failure on my team was a failure on his team. He modeled for me what it looked like to give people space to fail.
If you’re having a hard time releasing your own craving for success, let’s talk. Visit stevedwire.com/talk to start the conversation.
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