The Road Less Traveled

We’re often asked to benchmark our success—to celebrate what we’ve accomplished and impart to others what we’ve learned from our achievements. This is a valid and important exercise. There is a lot to learn from success. 

When you work hard and achieve something great, there is always something to learn—takeaways to deploy on future projects. You also feel good and want to share that with others. Success can be a great motivator, and you can certainly inspire team members with victorious war stories. 

But what if we step back for a moment and think about things a bit differently—take the path less traveled? What if we take time to consider our failures? What if we spent time reflecting on the mistakes, the missteps, the things we should have said and done?  

I realize this can be difficult, and sometimes stirring up memories and feelings that you would rather leave alone, can be painful and challenging. Taking the time to really evaluate our mistakes requires one to be vulnerable. And while vulnerability is hard, it is also incredibly important. By being vulnerable, by allowing ourselves to see who we really are—warts and all—and letting others see that to, we attain a level of honesty, clarity and a way of being in the world that is invaluable.

Today, and thanks in large part to social media, we spend a significant amount of time curating our world to look perfect to the friend or follower. We obsess on capturing the perfect moment and positioning what is happening in our lives to be viewed like a “best of” highlight reel with the desired goal of driving up likes and engagement. But what if we spent some time reflecting on the moments we chose not to share and really taking a hard look at what we experienced and what we can learn from them?

In the coming posts I’m going to challenge myself to do just this and share with you some of the mistakes I’ve made and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I think there is often far more to learn in failure than in success. 

While we will go more in depth in upcoming posts, here is a quick story to share. I am incredibly passionate about what I do. When explaining to my team a new program or initiative, I tend to get excited and pumped up about what lies ahead and this can sometimes be overwhelming for people. The excitement can cause me to move quicker than the time needed for other team members to process the idea. And while I have a completely solid and well thought out rationale for why we are tackling the project or idea, in the past I have not been as effective as I should have been in clearly communicating that to others. 

As I think back, there have been a few times over the course of my career when I am working with a team member to resolve something that has gone wrong with a project, and after some back and forth, it is revealed that they had no idea (or the wrong idea) as to why we were doing what we were doing. If they were lost, then of course, there were going to be mistakes. And that is completely on me. I take full responsibility for that.

And so how do I apply this knowledge today? I am currently spending time walking the whole Tampa General Hospital team—all 8,000 of them—through our new strategic plan which will serve as a guide for the organization over the next several years. As I prepared to do this, I intentionally and clearly built into my presentation addressing the “whys.” I made sure to stress the “and this is why” as I went through each section of the plan, leaving time for the team to challenge assumptions and ask questions, until they fully understood the plans being put into place. With this approach, everyone from the physicians to the maintenance staff, are clear on our direction moving forward.

I look forward to sharing some of my journey with you in the coming weeks. As always, thanks for engaging with me. I welcome your thoughts and your feedback both here and on my blog, Inventing Health.