From Pinnacle: It’s OK to Screw Up

At age 19, Kristen Hadeed launched a cleaning business with no leadership experience and before she knew it, she received a contract to clean 800 university apartments. She is now a well-recognized and accomplished author and speaker whose work has appeared on major networks and in bestselling books.

Hadeed started her talk with a story of when 45 of her employees quit at once—three-fourths of her work force—a message that EMS administrators can relate to. With high attrition rates and low wages, the cleaning industry shares many challenges with EMS in the areas of staff retention and turnover.

Strong leadership isn’t about having all the answers and getting everything right, said Hadeed. It’s having the courage to take risks, make mistakes, ask for help, and admit when you don’t feel strong.

During a particularly stagnant time in her business growth, Hadeed faced an insurmountable challenge and knew something had to change.

“I felt like my light was dimming,” Hadeed said, asking for a show of hands from her audience if they felt similar low periods along their leadership journeys.

“We decided we were going to change,” said Hadeed, who sold the cleaning segment of her business to focus on leadership development. Today, Hadeed coaches executives and leaders to improve performance in light of fear and anxiety.

Lessons for Growth Amid Fear

The advent of Gen Z and millennials is creating a more disengaged labor force, said Hadeed. According to Gallup, only 23% of people worldwide feel “engaged” in the work they do. One in five people feel lonely at work, and remote work is contributing to that problem.

“Our future leaders aren’t engaged,” she said of younger generations of employees who feel disconnected from their work and their colleagues. Leaders have to confront this issue and offer solutions to bring employees together. She offered these strategies and thinking points:

• Are you afraid to fail? Then you’re probably afraid for your team members as well. Ask yourself why. As long as you learn from what happened, you haven’t failed. Fear means that you care about what you’re doing. The goal is not to remove fear—it’s to identify it, acknowledge it, and to “dance with it,” according to Hadeed.
• A “resilience resume” can help you deal with a present challenge by realizing that you’ve gotten through 100% of all previous challenges. Hadeed recommended taking risks if only to add to your resilience resume.
• Everyone knows about “helicopter parents”—are we being helicopter leaders by not offering our employees additional responsibilities and allowing them to fail? Hadeed related a story of an employee who made a major mistake the first time she processed the company’s payroll. Rather than punishing the employee and taking her off the role, she allowed the employee to come up with her own solution to remedy the issue and kept her in charge of the task.

Build an environment where it’s not only OK to fail, but it’s used as a learning moment to grow and make people feel empowered over next steps.

Nobody wakes up with intentions to make mistakes, concluded Hadeed. “The best part about all of this is it’s in your hands,” she said. “You’ve got to give yourself that permission. I hope you do.”