Business Leadership – Invaluable Advice from Teddy Roosevelt

Posted on August 02, 2016 by Andreas Jones, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

As a leader, how do you respond to defeat and failure? Do they demoralize you? Do they tempt you to throw up your hands in resignation and cause you to quit after an unforeseen setback?

Socrates said to know thyself, and how a leader confronts defeat is an outstanding “poker tell” into understanding their psychology and leadership style. Are you one of those leaders that will claim all the credit when it comes to victory, but when you taste failure, you immediately seek out scapegoats and people to blame?

So much of leadership training is focused on motivating your team in order to accomplish victory and success. But what happens if instead you lead them to failure and defeat? Imagine having a group of people all staring at you, each recognizing that you’re the leader of the group, and each looking for an explanation after experiencing a crushing and demoralizing defeat.

How one decides to cope with failure is what often separates great leaders from the mediocre, and there was no leader who better understood this fact than President Teddy Roosevelt. Take these words from President Roosevelt, write them down on a piece of paper, and put them into your wallet.

Even better, when a gifted leader does experience a crushing defeat, and their team naturally looks to them for an explanation and guidance, being able to recite President Roosevelt’s lesson on leadership might be exactly what they need to hear.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Learning from defeat is what separates the “wheat from the chaff” when it comes to those who believe themselves to be great leaders. Those who have experienced nothing but victory and success throughout their careers will often implode when confronted with failure, while leaders who have been properly tested and tempered know exactly how defeat should be perceived.

The old saying “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” could be used to help explain how a gifted leader should view defeat. But it also begs the question, how does defeat actually make us stronger? Defeat paves the way for future success through applying the doctrine of backwards-mapping.