A Hundred Kilos on My Back; How I Became a Better Leader
Why practicing failure makes us better, and how to apply this to your team.
It was a pretty run down place and I was nervous.
I had just taken a short bus drive from Meta’s Seattle office to a small gym. I had a meeting with a coach and had one ask: teach me how to put a barbell on my back and move it down and then up again. Closing in on forty, I had never done anything like this.
Over the next few years, I continued a journey of mediocracy in lifting free weights.
It took me several years until I learned the most important secret.
I think that I first heard the secret in a Tim Ferris interview somewhere. The secret to getting good in a new sport is to learn how to fail. With well over a hundred kilos on my back, I was scared of failing. I was afraid that if I tried to lift too much weight, I would seriously injure myself. You see, I never learned how to fail safely.
So I learned how to fail safely.
And that made all the difference.
I was no longer afraid of biting more than I could chew. I knew how to bail out if I stretched myself too far. And it was this knowledge that allowed me, that made me give myself permission, to push myself harder. And this was the biggest driver of improving faster.
Making failure safe allowed me to demand more.
Spoiler: this is not a story about lifting weights. It’s a story about management.
“Is this your best work?” legendary diplomat Henry Kissinger asked his chief of staff.
In her book, “Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter” author Liz Wiseman recounts how Kissinger used this powerful question time after time. He didn’t relent until he finally got a “yes.” This is an example of a leader setting a high performance bar.
There is a misconception that supportive leader don’t push their team to their limits. Great leadership requires a supportive mindset. It also requires setting a very high performance bar. It requires stretching the people on the team so that can accomplish more than they think they know. It’s the only way to help people discover how much they are capable of.
Great leaders push their team to the edge of their capabilities.
But you can’t push people to their limit without protecting them.
Like the barbell analogy, people will not allow themselves to go all-in if they are scared. If the fear of injury exists, not physical but injury non-the-less, then humans will not give their all. If failing becomes safe, then, and only then, can leaders demand more of their team.
Great leaders create psychological safety for their team. Because they push them harder than anyone else.
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