Dealing with our Failures

I’m sure most of us through our lives have failed once, the problem however, is how do you come to admitting it to your team? What are the first words you say to your team and how do you bounce back from it?

In churches or the business organization, it probably is about the most embarrassing thing to say up in front of your team with all eyes on you and have them note we didn’t accomplish it or are on a pitfall. So what do we do?

We all have to note that part of becoming a great leader is to willingly admit to your mistakes. We can’t hide them because they will build up and cause havoc amongst you and your team. Especially with pastors. Many pastors at church I have noticed will not acknowledge their errors with the congregation due to the fact many members may leave, and want to make believe that the church has a firm standing.

I think that’s not the case. Once we admit that we have failed in front of everyone, the congregation will not get up and walk away. Instead since we are a team, this creates a tighter bond and much stronger motivation planning out how to bounce back up.

And how do we bounce back up?

Well we already establish ourselves to be motivated so that’s done. The next thing to do is to strategize what we are looking to aim for. What are the goals for the month? The year? Three years from now and how are we going to do it? Is everyone committed to be on board? When planning out, we have to be specific and give details in order to not come across failure again.

Another thought we have to keep in focus is not to listen to those who keep bringing us down (naysayers). If some of the members of the team left and decide to talk about the rest behind their backs, don’t listen to them. Listening to them will only cause more fuel to fail.

As leaders, when we fail, we should most importantly learn from it. This is how leaders become great. We build experience and gain knowledge if the path we are taking is the correct one to succeed. And what I love about this is that when we start to admit to our failures and learn from them, we then will gain more respect from our team or congregation, and that strong bond will be difficult to break.

To conclude, as leaders, how do you handle yourself when wanting to admit to your team of your failures? Do you address everyone about it at the same time or individually have them aware of what’s going on? If you’ve already had them aware, what was the experience like bouncing back up?

One important thing to keep note is that we shouldn’t be afraid to fail. Robert Kennedy quotes:

“Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.”