How to Turn Failure Into Growth as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

 
Are you unknowingly preventing your team's growth by focusing on mistakes instead of lessons?

In today's episode, we delve into the powerful shift from blame to learning and how it can transform both personal and team development. If you or your team are stuck in a cycle of blame after errors or failures, this episode offers a refreshing perspective on using mistakes as opportunities for growth.

In this 9 minute episode you'll discover how to:

• Reframe mistakes as learning opportunities to foster a growth mindset.
• Create a supportive environment where feedback is viewed as a chance for improvement rather than criticism.
• Shift from a negative mindset to one that actively seeks out lessons from setbacks.

Tune in now to learn how to turn errors into stepping stones for success and empower your team to evolve and thrive!

WHAT IS YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE?

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FULL TRANSCRIPT:

How you could be preventing you and your team's growth and today's quick quote episode.

Welcome to The Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast, the podcast helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout, and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace.

Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, my aspiring modern humanitarian and development leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. On today's quick quote episode here is the quote: "it's not the mistake that matters. It's how you interpret the lesson." By Michelle C Ustaszeski.

And sorry if I just mispronounced that name, evidently she is a teen coach.

What we're focusing on here is a lesson which I found very valuable I learned as a project manager and a country manager, and which really helped my team open up to more growth. And has helped myself as well.

But it's a good reminder for me and for probably all of you. And I wanted to share it today. The main idea behind it is not blaming, but learning. Shifting from blame to gain. And, in last Monday's episode I talked about how to have effective feedback conversations. Which are essentially the same as learning conversations. An effective feedback

conversation is one in which we learn more about the other person and they learn more about themselves. This is somewhat related in terms of the the way we frame conversations so that they are helpful to us and they're not making us defensive or shut down. And I'll give you an example.

My team when I was a head of office, there was a car accident. And several of them were involved. And when they all came together and they were in my office, surrounding my desk and they all had their heads down. They looked very remorseful. Thankfully, no one had been hurt. No animals, no people and the car had a bit of damage, but it wasn't too bad. We needed to have this discussion about what happened. And I could tell that, well, actually I could. I could tell because no one was talking, no one was sharing any information.

No one seemed willing to say anything. And I could sense that the reason for that was because they were afraid they were going to get in trouble. They were afraid they were going to get blamed. They were afraid that this conversation was about blame and not about gain. And so I told them, "look. I don't care who did what and the situation. What I want to know is I'm not blaming anyone for anything.

I just want to know what happened so that we can learn and we can move forward. So who would like to share?" And when I created that safe space, where they knew that they weren't necessarily going to get into trouble, Where that they could share, because we just wanted to learn how to improve for next time so it wouldn't happen again, then they started opening up and sharing.

And that was very impactful because we are able to learn from it. Whereas if no one had said anything or if it turned into more of a blaming conversation, It would not have been very useful at all.

Torrey: And we wouldn't have been able to interpret the lesson as the quote says.

So when we make a mistake or we fail and we are worried, or we're in a negative state, we are less likely to gain something from that situation. I know that sounds kind of counter intuitive or kind of weird. That you could gain something from a negative situation, but it's very true. We will gain more, we will learn more if we're in more of a positive mindset and a positive space. And part of that is also not shooting ourselves with more arrows.

Remember I talked about this a few episodes back? About how a lot of times we amplify our suffering. As in that Buddhist story about the Archer who shoots himself and then amplifies his suffering by going through all the things that have not happened yet, but that could happen.

And we do that when it comes to something failing or something, not going our way by saying that this shouldn't have happened or blaming ourselves, making ourselves feel bad and basically shooting ourselves with a lot of arrows. That only make our pain and suffering worse. And when we're in that kind of a state, we're not going to be thinking about what we can gain or how we can learn and move forward.

We're going to be just lot of times just spiraling in the suffering and misery. So what's helpful instead is to ask ourselves, how can we grow from this? How can we learn from this? And I was coaching someone fairly recently who was really shooting themselves with a lot of arrows. In other words, they were telling themselves that they were a failure that they weren't doing well that they had not been a good leader. All of these things.

And yet when I looked at the factual circumstances, it seemed that they were doing just fine. They were advancing in their organization. They were contributing. They were being asked by senior level people to contribute more. And so I asked them to look back in the past and all the failures or the challenges that they had faced and how they had learned from them and how they had actually benefited from them. And come back with a list that has ways in which they've actually gained from failures. And when they returned in the next conversation, they were so much more in a positive place, a more positive mindset. They named all these different situations where they had been challenged or they had failed in some way.

And looking back on it now they realize that they grew a lot from that situation and that they were able to handle it. And so when we make a mistake or when we fail at something or when our team makes a mistake or fails at something rather than blaming and shaming or going into a negative place. How can we instead making this to our benefit by asking ourselves, how has this made you grow?

What can we learn from this for next time? And so the next time that you find yourself making a mistake or your team makes a mistake. Ask these questions: how can you make this to your benefit? How can you learn something from this? How can you gain from this? This will put you in a much more positive place to learn, and that is how we move forward. Until next time, keep evolving. Bye for now.