By Mark Miller
Effective leadership isn’t just about making decisions and giving orders. It’s about fostering an environment where employees can grow, learn, and yes, even fail. This might sound counterintuitive, but giving employees room to fail is actually a crucial component of successful leadership and organizational growth.
I recently spoke with Ken Hicks, president, chairman & CEO of Academy Sports and Outdoors, Inc., and he offered a powerful insight into this leadership philosophy:
“A leader has to be willing to get criticized for something that their people did. Even if the leader might have been able to do it better, it was an opportunity to develop their employee.”
This statement encapsulates a fundamental truth about leadership: it’s not just about achieving results, but about developing people.
Developing people impacts engagement
So why is this approach important?
For one, it directly impacts employee engagement.
A recent Leadership IQ study found that only 26% of employees say that their job always enables them to learn and develop new skills.
However, those who do have such opportunities are 177% more engaged.
This statistic alone should make leaders sit up and take notice.
As we all know, engaged employees are more productive, more loyal, and more likely to go the extra mile for their organization.
Hicks elaborates on his approach: “Let them make decisions. You might have made a different decision, but they will own it, and they will make it work.”
He adds: “If a leader mandates every little thing they do, that leader is eventually going to fail. At some point, I can’t tell people everything they need to do; they need to be able to take the initiative.”
Idealist leadership
This mindset aligns closely with what we call the Idealist leadership style.
Idealists are high-energy achievers who believe in the positive potential of everyone around them.
They want to learn and grow, and they want everyone else on the team to do the same.
They’re often charismatic, drawing others to them with their intuition and idealism.
Their leadership skills are often quite refined, they’re open-minded and prize creativity from themselves and others.
Working for an Idealist leader offers the chance to be creative and to express oneself.
Team members find they have an equal voice and that they learn by doing. It’s a democratic experience that fosters growth and innovation.
However, it’s worth noting that this approach comes with less process and structure than some other leadership styles, which can be a plus or minus depending on the employee.
Bedding-in idealist leadership
But how do we practically implement this approach in our day-to-day leadership?
One powerful tool comes from Amazon’s decision-making playbook: the concept of “one-way and two-way doors.”
Read how it’s described in their leadership principles below:
“A one-way door decision is one that has significant and often irrevocable consequences – building a fulfillment or data center is an example of a decision that requires a lot of capital expenditure, planning, resources, and thus requires deep and careful analysis.
“A two-way door decision, on the other hand, is one that has limited and reversible consequences: Testing a feature on a site detail page or a mobile app is a basic but an elegant example of a reversible decision.”
The beauty of this model is that it provides a framework for leaders to give their employees more autonomy.
For two-way door decisions (which actually make up the majority of decisions in most organizations), leaders can encourage their team members to act with only about 70% of the information they wish they had.
This approach speeds up decision-making and innovation while providing valuable learning opportunities.
As Amazon puts it: “With the ability to easily reverse two-way door decisions, you lower the cost of failure and are able to learn valuable lessons that you can apply in your next innovation.”
Question rather than direct
This brings us back to Hicks’ approach of fostering growth through questioning rather than directing. “You get more from asking a question and getting people to think about the issue than you do just telling them, ‘Move this or say this.’ Sure, they moved it or said it, but did they learn anything? They performed a task, but that’s not learning.”
By encouraging employees to make decisions, even if they might fail, leaders create an environment of continuous learning and improvement.
This approach recognizes that failure, when properly managed, isn’t a setback but a stepping-stone to success.
However, implementing this leadership style isn’t without its challenges.
It requires leaders to relinquish some control and trust in their team’s abilities.
It also demands patience, as the learning process often involves missteps and corrections.
But the long-term benefits – increased engagement, faster innovation, and a more skilled and confident workforce – far outweigh the short-term risks.
Conclusions
Giving employees room to fail isn’t about lowering standards or accepting mediocrity.
It’s about creating a culture of learning, innovation, and personal growth.
It’s about recognizing that sometimes, the best way to develop a skill is through hands-on experience – even if that experience includes failure.
As leaders, our role isn’t just to direct and decide, but to create an environment where our team members can grow, learn, and ultimately succeed.
By adopting this mindset, we not only develop stronger, more capable employees but also build more resilient and innovative organizations.
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