Jun
22
Thanks again to everyone leaving comments or responding to the questions on their blogs. If you have a question about thought leadership you would like to see featured here, please send it to our team [Email address: team #AT# tedxlibrarians.com - replace #AT# with @ ].
Question 1: How can experience of failure contribute to making an effective thought leader?
Question 2: What venues are available to us to constructively criticize each others ideas?
#1: I think Winston Churchill says it well: success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Even when playing to one’s strengths things can go awry. Trying and failing is an essential mode of learning; learning and leading go hand in hand. I think for failure to translate through to more robust leadership it has to become part of the public story.
#2 trust and relationship must pre-exist for criticism to be constructive, and the venue of such dialogue will be a function of where that trust and relationship are situated: within associations, across the blogosphere, f2f etc. Focus more on building the profession and our workplaces: on CONSTRUCTION!
#1 We really do learn the most when we choose to learn from failure. Immediate success is far too easily attributed to dumb luck. Making a mistake shows you the steps you may have missed in planning an undertaking, the opinions you failed to consider or the details you skipped. Learning how to take calculated risks, and make productive errors is essential.
The next task for an effective manager is to learn how to create an “error-friendly” environment. This does NOT mean that the staff becomes a team of bumbling incompetents, but rather that there are sufficient controls and counter-balances in place to allow for experimentation. New services, new ways of doing things can be tested out without fear of alienating clients or causing significant problems (political or operational ) for the organization.
Thought leadership comes from taking those lessons and sharing them – having the confidence to tell the story of how you messed up, what lessons you learned, and how you would do something differently.
Question 1: Failure can teach humility, which we need in order to truly listen to other people. Being a thought leader is not the same as having all the answers, and an ability to listen to the thoughts of others is a great strength.
Question 2: I wish I knew! It would be great for librarianship if we had a website like Edge (edge.org) where we could gather the most thoughtful writers about librarianship to exchange and debate ideas.