How Tough Times Shape Exceptional Leaders

In this episode, we explore the concept that experience is the ultimate teacher when it comes to leadership. From learning through failure to cultivating resilience and embracing challenges as opportunities for growth, we uncover the wisdom that emerges from the flames and discover how every challenge is an opportunity to become a stronger leader. Join us as we delve into the hard lessons of leadership and uncover valuable insights for leaders navigating difficult situations.

Transcript

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Vernon Sanders law once said experience is a hard teacher. She gives the test first the lesson afterwards. In this episode, we're looking closely at what that means for leaders. Being a leader means facing big challenges before really knowing the best way to handle them. But it's these tough times that teach you the most valuable lessons about leading. When leadership gets really hard, it's those moments that teach us for the future. You need to realize that every hard situation you face is a chance to learn something important realistically, and that won't matter at the time as you'll be too busy trying to deal with the flames around you. I know we all like the easy life. I certainly do, but sadly, the best lessons are learned the hard way. Yes. You can learn through training. Yes. You can learn from reading. Yes. You can learn from watching others, but until you have to learn agile doing where there are real world consequences. I believe that only when there are consequences to your leadership, your decisions, do you really understand what it means to be in charge? And it's only after failure do you really grasp what it means to be in charge totally. It's only then that the full weight of the outcome lands upon you. Everyone commenting, everyone pointing, everyone discussing how you missed it up or how well it went or how they love working with you and how they'll follow you into the flames anytime. It's just a constant flow of feedback. So how do we learn through challenges? We all think the best way to learn is when you have to through a situation on your own, having to rely on your own skills, and it brings your brilliance to the surface. But that's not always true, though. Being part of a team allows you to leverage multiple minds. A leader is the sum of their team and the dynamics of that team. When you're asked to lead and you have to take your team into a difficult situation or challenging task, you'll soon see why you're not so good on your own. Fill these areas with people who are. Encourage them. Give them a chance to shine. Learning through challenges isn't about you doing and knowing everything. It's about taking charge, working out what to do, and getting it implemented successfully. The best leaders almost blend into the background. They're always there for you when you need them, but when you don't, they'll let you do your thing. Part of learning is embracing failure as feedback. Let's face it. Failure sucks. I've said it. No one likes to fail, but you will. We all do. As they say, it's what you learn from failing that matters, not repeating your mistakes. As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. When you get to the end of a situation, make sure you debrief debrief debrief so that you go over what's happened. If you're going to make mistakes, make sure that they're small ones not catastrophic ones so that you can't recover from them. Making checklists for common situations will help you overcome failure because you can refer to the checklist every time a certain situation happens. And you'll see this with pilots. They have checklists. If something goes wrong, they open their manual, and they find a checklist, and they go through the checklist to solve the problem. Well, there's no reason that you can't use that as well. By ticking off the steps, you make sure that you don't forget what you've learned and you ensure that everything that needs to be done is completed. There'll always be steps on each job that don't fit in this checklist. That's because there's no two clients, no two challenges that are exactly the same. You need to be ready for those and roll with them. These are the changes that we expect to see as leaders. You also need to cultivate resilience if you're going to learn your lessons. Resilience comes from insight. I'm not sure you can train for it, but you can plan for when you'll need it. In recent years, we've certainly discovered as the world is changing that as firefighters, we're seeing more longer, more intense fires. Luckily, we've had time to build our resilience thanks to our experience in the Australian 2019 20 fire season. The pandemic has taught many businesses just how frail they were. I saw many businesses collapse through no fault. I also saw a lot disappear because they didn't have plans in place for remote work, insurance in case of things going wrong, and a multitude of other things. One thing that firefighting has taught me is that you never know when things will be changing, so you better be doing everything you can to protect yourself. Do you have enough money in the bank to survive for 6 months if you can't work? It's entirely feasible that you could be in an accident on the way home tonight. Resilience isn't just about endurance. It's also preparation now. You need to use the power of reflective practice to improve your bouncing back from failure during those tough lessons. You can reflect on how to better deal with a challenge by using scenarios. By our station, we have a kit that allows us to lay out a fire ground on top of a green felt paper topper and we can add trucks and fires and houses, etcetera. Using this kit, I can work through a fire and see ways I can use to solve the problem and so can other members of my brigade. You can do the same by writing a story about a client problem or a business issue, and then start mind mapping or bullet pointing steps that you could take to solve this problem. In teaching, we call this concrete tools to help people learn. You can put your hands on them and that's why they call it concrete. It's a great way to combine mental and physical activation in the brain to increase the learning that you're going through. Practicing something like trying different software, improving your driving skills, repeating a blow with an ax, all give you time to think and perfect your knowledge and skills in one specific area. And that might be an area that you had a failing in or maybe something that you've realized that you actually needed to get better in when you've had those hard lessons thrown at you. How many times have you said, if I just had this blank, I could have solved that problem. Now you might not ever have that blank. So how else could you solve it? On a fire, for example, it's nice to have water bombers, but during a fire season, we're unlikely to get them on the coast because they're busy out west. That's just a fact. So while I might rely on them on a fire out west, I know that I can't rely on having them on the coast. I need to have other practices, other plans in place to overcome this. We're not just talking about doing practice for fun here, by the way. We're talking about doing this to solve a future problem that you've already experienced. So what does it really mean to be a leader when things get tough? I think that facing challenges isn't just part of the job, actually helped shape us into better leaders. It's about more than just telling people what to do. It's about coming together as a team, learning from the times we stumbled and finding our strengths when things don't go as planned. It's pretty amazing when you think about it. Every challenge is a chance to grow and to help our teams do the same. I hope this pod makes you feel more ready to take on whatever comes your way and see the value in those hard moments. Remember, it's totally okay to mess up sometimes. It's all part of our journey and it's how we learn and become stronger leaders. Keep moving forward and learning from each step and growing stronger. Remember, run towards the flames not away.