Lessons on Leadership from the Little Things in Life: Just because you can do it better doesn’t mean you should
Life is full of examples that teach us lessons. That’s why stories and illustrations make learning so much more effective. When a story can be used to illustrate or demonstrate a valuable lesson, the story makes it much more understandable, relatable, and memorable. With that in mind, I want to take some time to do just that – share examples of circumstances and stories experienced in everyday life which illustrate leadership lessons that we can learn and apply. This is one of those examples, and it teaches us that just because you can do something better than someone else doesn’t always mean that you should.
I have learned a lot about this from the independence of my two-year-old granddaughter. She is at the age and stage when she constantly wants to do things by herself. Just about anything that I am trying to do, from washing the dishes to responding to an email on the computer, she will jump in front of me and insist that she do it. Things that used to be done for her, like putting on socks and shoes, she has now become determined to do on her own. While this is adorable, it also brings challenges. Some of those things she is not yet able to do, and so it can be frustrating for both her and me when she refuses any help or won’t let someone else do it, even though it is something that is beyond her capability to do at this point in time. Other things she is able to do, but it takes a long time to be done, and generally not very neatly, and if I am not intentionally recognizing the importance of her learning in the process, it can be a challenge of patience.
This, then, begs the question of whether or not I should just jump in and take over. If I did, it would avoid the frustrations, and everything would get done quicker and better, with less mess. However, there would also be some incredibly valuable learning opportunities that would be missed. First, she would miss the opportunity to learn from failure. Second, she would miss the opportunity to grow in the struggle. Both of those are necessary in her development if she is going to learn to thrive and succeed well.
The same two things are true for anyone in any kind of work or endeavor, and therefore, they need to help frame the way you view these circumstances:
- Failure is necessary for learning. When we make it unsafe to fail, people. (and kids) don’t learn from their failures, they don’t gain an understanding of facing and navigating risk, and their ability to handle failure and loss diminishes. If failure is avoided enough times, then any potential obstacle will lead to quitting or defeat.
- Struggle is necessary for growth. Just like exercising your body or exercising your brain, struggle is required in order to make progress. But struggle doesn’t happen when the task is easy and you don’t have to work at it. That means that initially it’s going to take longer and not be done as well, but as strength and skill increase, so does the outcome.
Having spent over 30 years in education, too often I have seen parents rescue their children from academic or social failure, and what those children learn is that they will never have to experience failure because someone will rescue them. But then the day comes when they do experience failure for the first time, no one is there to rescue them, and they are not equipped to handle it. They would’ve been much better prepared for navigating life successfully if they had been allowed to struggle and fail and experience the frustration and consequences of those things in order to grow and learn.
That’s the lesson on leadership from this little thing in life, from my granddaughter forcefully insisting that she needs to try to do something by herself without any help. People need to experience failure so that they can learn from it, and they need to experience struggle so they can grow. Therefore, even if you could do it better, sometimes it is better to let someone else do it, knowing that it will make a mess. Be willing to do that. They will learn, they will grow, and you will both be better served in the long run.
