Recently, I was chatting with a fellow business owner about training their new leaders. As part of that conversation, we talked about the importance of new leaders finding ways to build their leadership confidence.

There are some very real consequences to both having leaders who are recklessly confident and those who are unjustifiably insecure.

So how do we create conditions that will encourage new leaders to find that middle ground where they are both confident yet still able to lead with humility?

Think ahead

Ideally, it starts before you promote them. If you have a tendency of promoting internally, then you've probably already identified individuals that you feel would make great formal leaders.

And before you just assume that they want that responsibility, check with them because they may not be interested. Not everyone wants to lead a team. It doesn't make them bad people or bad employees! It's just a choice.

Some people love what they do right now and they want to do it for...

Talking about the leadership mindset and communication culture of a particular team, Alan Mulally, former CEO of Ford Motor Company, said “Like a lot of companies, you only brought an issue to your supervisor if you had a solution. So now, you’re just managing a secret. You don’t know what’s going on.”

This approach is not unique to that particular organization. I remember being given that same advice as an employee. Being told just that: don’t go to your supervisor with a problem if you don’t have a solution. And later, in a position of leadership, I was reprimanded by a colleague for having brought up an issue during a leadership meeting. I was told: “We don’t tell him these things. It makes us look back.”

What?!?

That blew my mind. It made absolutely no sense to me.

“Isn’t that why we have these meetings?”

Of course, now, years later, with much more experience, now as an executive, I can say with...

A while ago, I read a quote by American psychologist B.F. Skinner that really spoke to me. Both as an individual and as a leader. It said: “A failure is not always a mistake. It may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.”

As leaders, we will face failure at some point. It’s not a question of “if”. It’s truly a question of “when”. And when that time does arrive, what lessons will you be teaching your team by your behavior?

The Need to Learn Lessons from Our Failures

The first thing that we need to consider is recognizing the actual need to learn lessons from our failures.

How are you role modeling that?

To start to learn from our failures, we have to own them. We have to accept our part in that failure.

There are some leaders who immediately look for someone else to blame. Although there may be times when those leaders truly had no part at all in this failure, we need to be careful of...