Last week I delivered a cascade of leadership programs at a major Ivy League University. During my morning session with deans and senior administrators, the conversation turned to risk-taking, something academics are not necessarily famous for. Participants were eager to discuss both how they could get more comfortable taking risks, and create cultures in which their colleagues were more comfortable as well.
I shared a few of the techniques I’ve learned while delivering workshops as well as from coaching. One is to seek out opportunities to take small risks, often in arenas outside of work.
For example, someone with my egregious technical skills might offer to help provide database support while volunteering for a small non-profit. Of course, this would only work if someone with the right skills was available there to catch my inevitable mistakes.
The benefit of this approach is two-fold.
First, forcing ourselves to learn the kind of skills we usually avoid pulls us out of our comfort zone. Risk-taking is by definition uncomfortable, so getting good at it requires a tolerance for emotional and intellectual discomfort.
Second, doing something we’re really bad at gives us a chance to practice humility. Most of us dislike feeling stupid, especially when being smart is part of our job description, as with academics. As a result, we often avoid tasks that might reveal our ignorance, which taking risks is bound to do.
Creating cultures in which others feel comfortable with risk requires being clear that mistakes are essential to learning, which means we want to look first for the lesson when something goes awry. Rather than fixing blame or focusing on who did what, we try to identify how the process might need to be tweaked. Did something get left off the checklist? Were there questions we should have asked the client in advance of starting the project? Did we have the wrong mix of skills on a team? Were we moving too fast?
The After Action Review used in US Army training is a useful model here. Such reviews are untaken after every maneuver, regardless of whether or not they’ve met their goals. What worked? What did not? What adjustments could be made to the supply chain? What additional training might be needed? The objective is to make systemic improvements on an ongoing basis, while creating a culture in which lessons learned are built into every effort.
Toward the end of last week’s discussion, the University’s Dean of Admissions suggested that academics could benefit by learning from entrepreneurs. After all, entrepreneurship requires a willingness to take risks, since there’s usually a good reason that nobody has offered a particular product or service before.
The dean said, “I was raised in a family that emphasized the importance of getting everything right, which is probably one reason I feel comfortable in a university environment. But I recently had a conversation with a woman who had started multiple businesses and whose father was also an entrepreneur. She described how, at the dinner table every evening, her father would go around the table and ask everyone to talk about one failure they’d had that day. The idea was to celebrate one another’s mistakes and stumbles as evidence that they were all trying to do something new and hard.”
This amazed the dean who told the story, recommending it as a practice for anyone trying to encourage greater risk taking whether for themselves, for those on their teams, for their students or for their own families. I agree that this is a terrific approach for any of us who recognize that we need to get more comfortable with risk.
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