The Mark of a Good Leader

When people fail, a good leader doesn’t treat them as failures; s/he corrects them and tries to help them learn their lessons so they can do it better next time. The leader does not throw the baby out with bath water. There are many people who, when you make one mistake, they cancel you. They don’t want you around anymore, they don’t want to talk to you anymore, and they put you aside because they do not want to deal with you anymore. All this, is a sign of poor leadership. True leaders are not annoyed by people’s failures, they are challenged by them. They do not consider the behavior, but the potential within. Leaders separate a person’s behavior from their self worth and do not confuse their value for their present condition.

In every organization, there will be opportunities to fail, and some people do fail. Leaders need to realize that that everybody fails. The former President of the USA, Bill Clinton, wrote this about himself in his book---My Life. During the final days of his presidency, the then Chairman of PLO, came to his office to thank him for his efforts of bringing a lasting peace in the Middle East and to let him know that he was a great man, but Clinton replied “ Mr. Chairman, I am a failure, and you made me one.” Here is a highly successful and admired leader world over who confessed to be a failure---he had spent so much time in retreats and meetings trying to achieve an elusive peace deal.

Some people make mistakes and the first thing they say is “I will never amount to anything. My mom always told me I was a failure, my grandma told me nothing worthy could come out of my life, and the teachers told me I was a loser". Then, they sit down in a puddle of failure and bathe themselves. For years they stay in that puddle. If you have missed your exit on the highway of life, don’t continue in the wrong direction. Stop, turn around and get back on track and be like Dr. Myles Munroe who said “Failure is only a temporary detour and should never become a permanent address.”