Last time I talked about Choosing Integrity and how a leader must choose to lead by an ethical example. I covered the importance of setting, defining and meeting standards. This week I want to cover taking risks and assuming responsibility for those choices.

If you want to be a good leader will have to take risks and assume the repercussions of those risks, good and bad.

My father had an opportunity, back before cell phones became so commonplace, to acquire a cell franchise with a national carrier. He balked and had 100 excuses why it was a bad idea. His biggest excuse was that he didn’t believe cell phones could become popular enough to make any money on, that only rich business men would ever have them. The family and his employees tried to convince him and even though cell phones fit in well with his audio visual store he didn’t have the foresight and, most importantly, he didn’t want to take the risk. Well, we all know how popular cell phones have become. His fear of risk cost him in a lot of ways.

As a leader these risks filled situation will come up often. You should, at minimum, be willing to explore and evaluate them. For example,

• Could switching your team to a 4-day work week decrease work hours but increase productivity?
• Could making your office “green” significantly increase costs short term but decrease them long term?

While you should never take uninformed risks, the fact is that some times the choices you make will go wrong. You took the risk and failed. If that avant-garde ad campaign you approved was an unmitigated flop, stand up and accept responsibility. Don’t try to pass on the failure to your team or others around you. Avoiding responsibility for your choices will only serve to make you look like you are led by your team - they make decisions without you knowing or approving - and will lose you the respect of those you are blaming as well as your superiors. You become ineffective to upper management and a source of resentment to your staff.

You could, like my father, simply avoid situations that have risk attached. Functioning in this manner will probably rarely lead to failure but neither will it lead to innovation and growth. Being a good leader means you don’t get to sit back and go with the flow, you don’t get to follow someone else’s orders. You are giving the orders, you ARE the flow. Embrace it!

Check back with us next time when I will discuss how important it is for a leader to Choose Adaptability. It will be just one more tool that you can add to your arsenal to help you become a better leader.