Venturing into new and risky territory is great for all of us, and a necessity for leaders. Yet being bold and daring is increasingly absent, particularly among established executives and organizations. If your decisions are based too heavily on the need to manage risk, then risk is actually managing you. Everyone fails from time to time. If that’s the worst case, would you rather fail because you dared to do something new and different, or because you played it too safely?
Here’s a start:
- To what extent are your key decisions biased toward risk-avoidance versus courage / innovation?
- What’s at stake (the worst case) if you take more risks, and occasionally fail? Can you / would you recover from that?
- What would have to change for you to rebalance the way you consider risk in your leadership decision-making?
David Peck
Executive Coach and President
Leadership Unleashed
Twitter: recoveringleadr
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Based on client experiences / lessons learned, our weekly LeaderTips have been offering self-coaching themes and topics of interest to leaders since 2004. They are often published in BusinessWeek Online, sent weekly to our clients, and hundreds of other corporate leaders worldwide. I invite you to forward them to others, who are also welcome to subscribe using the link below. Note that over 100 of these tips appear in my book, Beyond Effective: Practices in Self-aware Leadership. Click here to subscribe to LeaderTips via email.
