by Pete Mackey, Ph.D., and Elise Partin
We often assume that we must handle our personal and professional growth on our own. That asking for help from others implies weakness, or that we should be able to figure out for ourselves how to handle tough situations. At the same time, we also know that help from a mentor or professional coach can have a huge impact at every career stage—strengthening our communications skills, improving our management abilities, helping us navigate crises, and more.
We’d like to draw attention, though, to an essential quality of leadership growth that is often overlooked: emulating grace. All that grace requires is something hard but essential, namely practicing what anyone deserves when they mess up: knowing and accepting that no one hits the mark every time. Otherwise, we risk losing time fixating on what went wrong rather than working toward the goal. And, in fact, missing the mark can even provide a path to improving our abilities that success rarely allows.
We’ve seen through our own experiences as executive coaches that leaders who employ grace for themselves are far more likely to extend it to others and to have thriving teams with higher levels of employee performance, satisfaction, and retention. Extensive studies, like the research cited here, make this reality plain—which is a critically important fact these days, when employees by the millions are considering and making massive life changes. For good leaders, learning from failure is not a bug but a feature. As this comprehensive study of good failure concludes, “What matters is how people fail, how they respond to failure, and where those failures lead.”
Our executive coaching services build on this premise, and we’re excited to offer two related opportunities this month:
For the remainder of March 2022, you can schedule a free, 30-minute executive coaching intro session with Elise Partin, four-time elected mayor, TEDx speaker, and Mackey Strategies’ senior counsel in executive communications coaching. Elise has a long career of empowering leaders and their teams by providing personalized guidance, tools, and training drawn from extensive real-world experience.
On March 23, all working women are invited to an in-person, half-day workshop, Women Getting in the Game: Developing Your Leadership & Communication Playbook. Held at Benedict College and led by Elise Partin and Benedict College President Dr. Roslyn Clark Artis, this workshop will give you tangible skills to support your leadership growth and increase your opportunities for success.