Leadership training: where does the difficulty of learning from success come from

Apr 6
13:21

2011

Torri Myler

Torri Myler

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There are three powerful obstacles that can prevent people and institutions from benefiting from being successful as much as they benefit from making mistakes.

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Learning is a complex process that every individual and every organization need to go through on a regular basis. Companies have long been aware that it is from making mistakes where a lot of powerful motivation to move ahead can come from and they stopped discouraging managers and employees from risky experimentation. They know that within certain limitations things going wrong means opportunity for individuals and the organization to learn and move ahead. While there is growing agreement on this point,Leadership training: where does the difficulty of learning from success come from Articles much less is talked about how firms should learn from their own success. In fact, the topic is so marginalized that it is fair to assume that something must be amiss here and indeed something is. Three powerful obstacles prevent people and institutions from benefiting from being successful as much as they benefit from making mistakes.

First on the list, there is what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. This fancy name describes a mechanism typical of most people that propels them to see their own inherent qualities and skills as the cause of winning or being great at something, minimizing credit they give to the context or luck. Organizations, being composed of people with their merits and weaknesses, mirror this tendency by trusting too much in its own set characteristics, rather than an entire ecosystem of factors. Interestingly, in talking about others, we reverse our criteria – putting external factors and luck as top catalysts of their success. We also reverse the criteria when focusing on failure. In business environment, it means that companies are often short of analytical knowledge and apparatus to attribute success to right factors. This misinterpretation, more often than not, leads to troubled decision-making.

Second, there is the problem of overconfidence bias. Shortly put, the more we win, the more optimistic and risky we become in our evaluation of future actions. This stems from a rising level of confidence we have in ourselves. While everybody needs a certain degree of self-belief to sustain their efforts, it is wrong to become too trustful of your powers. Consequences include unwillingness to pay attention to advice from outsiders and excessive appetite for risk, in particular when it comes to taking well-trodden paths or repeating successful methods. As many leadership development experts would attest, being overconfident is a major factor in clouding good judgment as your levels of self-criticism sink and your ability to see outside the box are narrowed by infatuation with your own success.

Third, while failure attracts interest from people who are ready to investigate its causes and mechanics, success tends to attract a different sort of attention, much less analytical and much less critical. Enron was a beacon of top class management in case studies of the best business school and leadership training specialists published mere weeks before it melted down under the weight of accounting fraud. Success, in other words, does more to validate our practices and tactics, much less to help us take a longer view at them.