The Courage to Lead

Permission to Screw Up: How I Learned to Lead by Doing (Almost) Everything Wrong – Kristen Hadeed (Portfolio)

Hands down the question I get asked most often when conducting a leadership training or seminar is; “What are the most important skills a leader can possess or develop?” Since the focus of most of my seminars are focused on leadership communication I naturally peg the most important skillset as being communications skills.

A close second on the list is courage. Courage involves many facets of leadership, perhaps the most important being to admit that you don’t have all the answers and the ability to admit when you’ve made a mistake, a wrong choice or just flat out messed up. The most important superpower that leaders must possess is the ability to not only learn from their mistakes, but to harness the knowledge you gain and improve future outcomes.

That superpower is the focus of Kristen Hadeed’s debut business book, Permission to Screw Up: How I Learned to Lead by Doing (Almost) Everything Wrong. Hadeed is the seemingly accidental founder of Student Maid, a company that has hired hundreds of student to get down and dirty mopping floors and cleaning toilets. Hadeed admits that she stumbled along when the business got started and along the way discovered her leadership style/path and has succeeded in not only developing the courage to admit her errors, but to learn and build a company culture that scores amazing retention rates in an industry better known for its rate of turnover.

If you have been around business for any length of time you have crossed paths with those hard chargers bent on perfection who are doomed to fail. Hadeed seems to grasp the concept that it’s okay to not be perfect and spells out how you can be successful without being perfect. She does a nice job of imparting the knowledge she gained in a hard fought manner, in the trenches of business, which raises the value of the advice she shares.