Quote-A-Day: Day 312

Encourage doing the right thing.

Discourage doing things right.

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There’s a difference between doing the right thing, and doing things right.

Doing the right thing means we’re supporting solid moral thinking, and leading and learning in a way that promotes helping everyone get better.

Doing things right assumes that there is one right way to do things.

And that’s wrong. J

We should always be encouraging others to do the right thing (and we need to make sure we’re doing this ourselves).

However, we should never encourage others to do things right.  Because, realistically, there is no one right way to do things.

We want those we serve to see the power of failure, and to understand they should be reaching to make mistakes, rather than reaching for a right answer.

When we build capacity for failure, we help others see that there are multiple ways to arrive at a solution, and importantly, that there are multiple solutions to any problem.

As effective leaders, we need to be sure we’re always doing the right thing, but should never worry about doing things “right.”