Change your mindset, change the games
How I unlocked my potential with a growth mindset
Once I failed…
to deliver a global 1.3 million dollar C-suite customer engagement on time on which I worked with my supervisor at my previous employer. I had simply failed to meet the milestones, but people began patting me on the back and suggesting to step down from leading the complex customer engagement.
Especially as a woman,
I was always told that I had got to be twice as good to get half as far. I pushed myself so hard during the engagement that this failure was not an option. When I missed the deadlines, it felt for me like a public failure.
My supervisor told me that bouncing back in the face of failure can be an especially fraught challenge for me as a women.
I was judged more harshly for my mistakes than male colleagues and he saw that I responded by being more risk averse, a tendency often exacerbated by the quest for perfection.
My supervisor advised…
that he wanted me to run and lead by being myself and embracing my mistakes. He wanted me to be a female role model that has a platform to change that perception that women have to be perfect. He made me realise that my worry about not being seen as perfect can make me in business more risk averse and I have good reason to worry about how I will be judged.
Then I said…
“what the hell, no, I will never step down from leading this engagement“.
That is where I saw the way my leadership made a difference. It was not a failure. It was an obstacle that I had to deal with.
I realised…
that it is not just about how I handle my own mistakes, but how I respond when those I supervised drop the ball. The role of me being a leader was to make it safe for people to fail in my engagement.
I said that we at my previous employer need to move from fail safe to safe fail, especially for women.
The message of me as a leader was failure means people tried and people need to do things differently.
I am now taught…
a set of skills to help me set reasonable goals and practice self-compassion and work through these setbacks:
- I have built teams both inside and outside the office that will provide feedback and help coach me through a failure.
- I as a leader am to be open about my own stumbles. Customers and colleagues appreciate that I am not perfect all the time. It makes me more relatable.
This kind of resilience, is the foundation for my leadership.
Thanks for reading! Liked the author?
If you’re keen to read more of my Leadership Series writing, you’ll find all articles of this weekly newsletter here.
