And treat those two impostors just the same..” Rudyard Kipling
Ambition drives achievement, but it can also drive avoidance of reality.
Likewise failure can be heartbreaking, and can drive avoidance of the same reality.
A leader’s job is to ensure reality features in decision making – not just ambition and fear.
A good predictor of a team’s future success is how both success and failure are dealt with in meetings.
Encouragement of success is vital to build confidence and reward effort but focus only on the emotion of victory is not enough.
Failure is a part of life. Humans feel even a small loss far more than a big gain, so we often over-emphasize the emotions of failure – easily turning them into a disaster.
The key is balance.
Relentless focus on reality and context will keep both Triumph and Disaster in their place.
Consider how issues that are infrequent and random – but which can cause major disruption – are dealt with in your regular meetings. Things like major quality or safety incidents, major customer problems or project delays.
One way to handle these is by exception, only report on them when there is a problem.
A better way is to report regularly, whether there are problems or not, so that even if nothing most of the time that’s at least understood and the occasional issue isn’t seen as a disaster but as an exception, allowing better judgment to be used to deal with it.
Ditto for things that might be a triumph…
“..a leader’s job is to ensure reality features in decision making..”
Smart, regular use of Data helps to keep issues in perspective . You may indeed have a disaster, the numbers should show whether it is or not.
If triumph and disaster dominate your agenda you’re either in a very unique organization, or missing some important basic issues.
Are you covering real issues with real information or just talking?
Are you encouraging high performance or avoiding the elephant in the room?
If meetings are meant to help decision making, are you allowing creeping subjectivity to effect decisions or are you strong enough to bring the discussion back to facts?
Does your team have “after meetings” where the truth is shared amongst smaller groups who feel they can’t be open in the real meeting?
Worse, are decisions made which are based on skewed information, then left as is without later reference to the truth?
Numbers can be wrong, data can be manipulated. But they can at least be discussed in a way that opinions and emotions cannot. We seldom make charts about how we feel about somebody’s ideas, but if somebody’s idea has been recorded and measured at least we can discuss the idea itself.