“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” – Plato
Fear is a real thing. At some point, everyone deals with it. We fear change, we fear lack of change, we fear failure, we even sometimes fear success. The list goes on and on.
Recently, I was reminded of a client I worked with a number of years ago who provided an example of something else that leaders often fear: reality. I was working with a group that was talking about a potential market expansion, and they felt like that expansion was the most crucial thing to the long-term health of their business. They were convinced it had to happen.
The problem was that they were so convinced it had to happen that they adjusted their reality to justify that belief. They put together financial projections, and the projections showed annual growth rates that were triple anything they’d accomplished in a decade. Their list of expectations included no staff turnover, a new market with no real competitors, and no changes to their regulatory environment. All ridiculous.
And yet, most of the group refused to believe that they were delusional. They had already decided that this expansion was the necessary path, and they didn’t want anything like facts to interfere. So they went ahead with it, and failed miserably.
That may seem like an extreme example, but how often do we do essentially the same thing? How often are we so intent on doing a particular thing that we either ignore or change the facts to justify it? How often are we so convinced of the rightness of our belief that we convince ourselves that all arguments to the contrary can only be coming from people who are out to get us?
Unfortunately, we do that quite often. And as leaders, when we ignore reality we set ourselves and those we lead up for failure. We lead people down a path with clear pitfalls that we refuse to address, or even discuss. And when failure happens, we seem surprised.
Don’t take that path. Surround yourself with people who aren’t afraid to argue with you, and then encourage them to argue. Encourage your people to base what they do and what they think on actual reality. Don’t allow your organization to function in a fake world. It will seem great at first, but it will eventually end in disaster for your organization. And you will have led it there.
