Great Leaders Turn Failures into Successes

Shh! Don’t tell anyone this – its a secret few people know, or at least understand – Everyone fails more often than they succeed.

It’s true. The best professional baseball players make outs seven out of every ten at bats. The best basketball players in the world make baskets less than half the time they shoot the ball. How many failures did Thomas Edison go through before he perfected the light bulb? How many times did the Wright brothers fail to leave the ground before they got off it in the first airplane?

These are famous examples but if you think about your daily life, and if you’re honest with yourself, you’ll agree even you fail more often than you succeed. So what makes some people succeed more often than others?

Is it luck? Is it intelligence? Is it perseverance? Probably all of these things and many more.

One thing is for sure. With all these failures, people can get discouraged. They might even stop trying to succeed? Isn’t the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Why keep trying?

I think great leaders encourage those they are leading to keep trying. Great leaders find ways to motivate, inspire, and even brainwash their followers into believing they can succeed, even though they’ve failed over and over again.

In the face of failure, great leaders don’t look to blame, find fault and discourage. They help “pick up” their followers with words of encouragement, stories of famous failures that turned into successes and even a simple pat on the back.

If you want to be a great leader, the next time members of your team fail, reward them with words of encouragement and ideas on what they could do differently next time to try to achieve success. Then remind them that the most successful people in their fields all over the world and throughout history have only succeeded 30-40% of the time.