Danny Wade says it’s one of the hardest things a leader can do. But it’s also one of the most necessary: Sometimes, you have to show that you’re human.
You might think it decreases your employees’ confidence in your leadership abilities when you step up and tell them that you don’t know something or that you were wrong about an idea or initiative. But the president and chief operating officer of Goodman Networks Inc. — a network solutions company that generated $221 million in 2008 revenue — says it can actually do the opposite. Admitting that you don’t have all of the answers shows your team that you’re willing to admit fault, seek input and continually improve yourself as an executive.
“One of the things is that organizations need to see their leaders willing to accept and acknowledge when a decision they’ve made may have gone in the wrong direction,” Wade says. “It makes you more human and relatable.”
Smart Business spoke with Wade about how you can use self-evaluation, feedback and criticism to better your leadership skills.
Learn from failure. Self-evaluation is one of my strengths on a personal level. I am the youngest of 10 boys, so I had nine older brothers, which tends to put you in a more humble position. And I have just been the type of person who steps back and truly looks at myself and what I’ve done and decisions I’ve made.
I’ve told the organization numerous times that I learn more by my failures than my successes. By analyzing our failures and determining where we went wrong is how we truly improve in our personal lives or our professional lives. So I do a great deal of introspective thinking and putting myself in other people’s shoes, seeing how they perceive things. Those two traits and characteristics make for a better environment in an organization. It shows employees that this is leadership that is truly going to work with them to evolve and get better versus being set in your ways and driving things down the way they always have, not making adjustments along the way.
It’s a balance, because on one hand you want to use the methods and the tools in the past that have made you successful. But the problem is that you can’t bring everything you’ve done in the past into different environments. As you come into a different environment, you have to know how to be able to adjust, how to tweak yourself so you can drive the organization to achieve optimal execution. The success is in how the organization performs, not how we as leaders perform.