Why leaders can't ignore others' failures
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American’s love a success story. Heck, our whole history is basically a story of bootstrapping our way to success. Unfortunately for business leaders, focusing only on the success stories isn’t enough to make you succeed in business. Scott Eblin’s points out the statistical phenomenon called survivorship bias, which describes the tendency to include only successes in statistical analysis. Doing so leaves out a huge amount of potentially crucial, business saving information. Writes the author:
Leadership and organizational theories are constructed and tested by examining not just the successes but also the failures. Good and bad leaders, successful and failing change efforts, all get included in the analysis and the resulting theories spare us from our survivorship bias. If we want to grow into outstanding leaders, we must know how and when to utilize the knowledge provided by the existing body of leadership research.
Good leaders focus on where the bullet holes are; great leaders consider where they aren’t.
Full story at Scott Eblin’s Next Level Blog.
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