Achieved Strategies

Welcome to the fallout
Welcome to resistance
The tension is here
Between who you are and who you could be
Between how it is and how it should be

Maybe redemption has stories to tell
Maybe forgiveness is right where you fell

- Lyrics from Switchfoot’s “Dare You to Move”

I’ve written lately about making others wrong and the need to be right: the difference between what we want/see and what is presented; “between how it is” and how it could be.  These are limiting behaviors of a similar nature that cripple individual and team performance.  And since you’re human, you, like me, have demonstrated these behaviors, knowingly and unknowingly.

This post, however, is not to help you figure out why or how (well maybe a little) to recover from the messiness. This post is about forgiveness.

As leaders, we are faced with situations that require us to act with not enough time and not enough detail. We rely on automatic ways of being that help us through these situations and so many others.  And yes you have made mistakes. You’ve even made a mess or two.

But like the lyrics above point out, where we can redeem ourselves from the messiness of leadership is at the place where the breakdown occurred: where you made a colleague wrong; when you stuck to your guns just to avoid having to accept something different from what you wanted, from what you believed. It’s there where the messiness occurred, or “where you fell” that forgiveness can be offered.

We are bound to crash into one another.  Cleaning up the ensuing messes is part of working together. Sure we all need to be aware of how frequent those messes are, and their severity. Yet, it’s when we go back to the person and acknowledge our role in the breakdown a new path forward is created.

It’s forgiveness that helps make that possible. I boldly believe that we all need to do more of this in the corporate world. Less finger pointing and more cleaning up messes, forgiving, and moving forward.

Photo by akuma-sayian