Leadership Horizons

The Power of Making Mistakes

• Lois Burton • Episode 32

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Perfection is a convincing mask—and a costly one. We explore how the fear of getting it wrong quietly caps performance, stalls innovation, and isolates leaders from the very insight they need most. 

Starting with a raw early‑career misstep during a high‑stakes change program, we trace the moment a blunt admission—“I got it wrong”—transformed a tense, silent room into a creative surge that rebuilt the plan and delivered a stronger outcome.

From there, we break down why psychological safety is not a “nice to have” but the operating system for modern teams. You’ll hear how vulnerability unlocks contribution, why failure reveals the mechanism behind success, and how your response to error—forgiveness, ownership, or deflection—becomes your leadership brand. 

We share field-tested coaching insights from two decades with senior leaders across sectors, connecting the dots between candor, speed of learning, and resilient execution when stakes are high and timelines are tight.

To make it practical, we offer three simple tools you can use this week: reframe your language from “I failed” to “I learned” and extract specific lessons; run a one‑minute‑each mistakes-and-learning round in your team meeting, and go first to model the tone; and build mistake recovery into planning with assumptions, early warning signals, and rollback paths. These moves reduce fear, accelerate feedback, and turn uncertainty into momentum.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a leader who needs the nudge, and leave a quick review—what’s one mistake you’ll turn into a lesson this week?

 

Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to Leadership Horizons. I'm Lois Burton and I'm so very glad that you're here today. For those of you who are just joining us, I'm an executive coach and leadership development specialist. I've spent over two decades working with senior leaders, executives, and leadership teams across every sector you can imagine. And you know what? In all those hours across all those sectors with all those brilliant leaders, there's one thing I've seen consistently hold people back more than anything else. It's not lack of talent, it's not lack of opportunity, it's the fear of making mistakes. So today I want to talk about something we don't discuss enough in leadership circles, the absolute power of making mistakes. Not just accepting them, but actually embracing them as one of your most valuable leadership tools. Now I didn't always believe this. Let me take you back a long way. Very early in my career, long before I founded Lois Burton Limited, I was working in the retail sector. I was young, ambitious, driven, and absolutely terrified of getting things wrong. I was a graduate trainee, new into leadership, and I thought leadership was about having all the answers, about being the person in the room who never stumbled, never faltered, never showed uncertainty. And then I made a massive mistake. I was asked to get involved with some other colleagues with a very high-profile organizational change initiative. And lead one of the key parts of that. It was one of those projects that affects everyone and where the stakes feel impossibly high. We were about six weeks into implementation when I realized I'd fundamentally misread the situation. The approach for my part of the project I'd designed with such confidence, it wasn't working. In fact, it was making things worse. I remember sitting in my car in the car par one evening, just sitting there with the engine off, feeling this crushing weight. I had two choices. I could push forward, try to make my flawed plan work through sheer force of will and hope no one noticed the cracks, or I could walk back in the next day and admit I got it wrong. I didn't sleep that night. And I'll be honest, the first option felt way safer. But something in me knew it was the coward's way out and absolutely the wrong thing to do. So the next morning I called a team meeting. I was shaking as I stood up in front of everyone and I said, I need to tell you something. This approach I've been leading, it's not working. Okay. I got it wrong. And I need your help to figure out how we fix this. The silence that followed felt like an eternity. And then something remarkable happened. One of my team members, someone who'd been very quiet up until that point, spoke up. She said, Thank you for saying that. I've been worried about this for weeks, but didn't feel I could say anything. And suddenly the floodgates opened. Ideas started flowing, people who'd been holding back started contributing. Within an hour, we'd completely redesigned our approach, and it was 10 times better than anything I could have created on my own. That mistake changed everything for me. Not just that project, which actually ended up being one of the most successful initiatives I'd ever led, but my entire understanding of what leadership actually means. You see, when I work with senior leaders now, I often see this pattern. The higher people climb, the more they feel they need to project this image of infallibility. They think vulnerability is weakness. They believe that admitting mistakes will undermine their authority. But here's what I've learned over 25 years of coaching. Sitting across from CEOs and managing directors and senior executives, the leaders who truly transform their organizations are the ones who've learned to harness the power of their mistakes. Let me break down what I mean by that. First of all, mistakes create psychological safety. When you as a leader can say, I got this wrong, you give everyone permission to take risks. You create an environment where innovation can actually happen because people aren't paralyzed by fear. Some of the most extraordinary teams I've coached have been the ones where the leader models this kind of openness. Secondly, mistakes are your fastest route to growth. I tell my coaches this all the time. You learn more from one significant failure than from 10 successes. Success tells you what works. Failure tells you why it works. That's where the real insight lives. That's where transformation happens. Thirdly, how you handle mistakes defines your leadership brand more than anything else. People are watching. They're always watching. They see how you respond when things go wrong. Do you blame others? Do you make excuses? Do you pretend it didn't happen? Or do you take ownership, learn from it, and move forward? That choice, repeated over time, becomes your reputation. Now I'm not saying you should make mistakes carelessly. I'm not advocating for recklessness. What I'm saying is that in a world moving moving as fast as ours is, if you're not making mistakes, you're probably not pushing hard enough. You're playing it too safe. The way we led yesterday isn't going to lead us into tomorrow. That's why I started this podcast. We need to push boundaries, explore our horizons, and that requires a willingness to venture into ill uncertain territory where mistakes are inevitable. So let me leave you with three practical strategies you can implement right away. One, reframe your language. Stop saying I failed and start saying I learned. This isn't just positive thinking, it's accurate. Every mistake contains a lesson. Your job is to extract it. Two, create a mistakes ritual. In your next team meeting, try this. Ask everyone to share one mistake they made recently and what they learned from it. Lead by example. You go first. Watch what happens to the energy in the room. Thirdly, build mistake recovery into your planning. When you're setting up a new initiative, don't just plan for success. Plan for mistakes. We talked about this last week as well. Ask yourself, what could go wrong? How will we respond? Who needs to know? How will we learn from it? This isn't pessimism. This is resilience. Here's the truth I want you to take away today. Your mistakes don't define you. Your response to them does. And when you get really good at this, when you can move through mistakes with grace, humility, and curiosity, you become the kind of leader people want to follow. Not because you're perfect, but because you're real, because you're growing, because you're showing them it's safe to try, to risk, and to become more than they currently are. That's the kind of leadership we need right now. That's the kind of leadership that creates authentic, confident leaders who can build extraordinary teams and resilient organizations. Thank you for joining me today on Leadership Horizons. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to hear about it. And remember, next time you make a mistake, you've just been handed a gift. The question is, what are you going to do with it? Just as a trailer, um, in the next few weeks, I will be talking to some great leaders who are currently leading transition and change and getting and getting their view. And one of the questions I'm going to be asking them is what mistakes have they made along the way and what have they learned from it? I'm Lois Burton, and I'll see you next week as we continue to lead beyond boundaries.