(Please note that there is a free workshop offer you can attend at the bottom of this article.)

Recently, there was an article on CNBC with Suzy Welch in which she interviewed Jeff Bezos. She asked him what he looked for in people to promote to a leadership position. He answered, “I want people who are right most of the time.” (Find the article here.) He doesn’t care how smart they are, he just wants them to be right most of the time. She did some nice follow up questions and provided some great insight to what Jeff was thinking. This is great advice, but there is another side to this that should also be explored.

Most of us (hopefully all of us) agree that we want our leaders (and ourselves) to be right most of the time. But a very key word in that phrase is “most.” If any of us think that we will be right “all” of the time, then we are already wrong!

It is impossible to be perfect. Some decisions we make will not work out the way we think or planned for them to work out. That’s ok. There is a saying, “Fail early, fail often, fail cheap.” The best organizations in the try to live by that rule. Why?

Because they know that if they are not failing, they are not stretching themselves, and stretching yourself is the only way to move forward.

When teaching my kids to snow ski, I often told them that if they were not falling at least sometimes, then they weren’t challenging themselves and if they didn’t do that, they’d never get better. I learned this lesson from a friend of mine when I was quite a bit younger. When I was going down a somewhat tough hill, I would also stop right before the edge of a steep part of the slope. I’d then check it out to see how I wanted to handle it. Big mistake! I’d then try to start up again and usually end up falling right away because I didn’t have any momentum to carry me through.

He taught me that I needed to ski over the edge and THEN determine if I needed to stop. What normally happened was that I would just continue down the slope because I was under control and had momentum to continue. Would I fall sometimes? Yes, but I also learned from that for the next time.

In the same way, organizations need to keep moving forward and learn quickly what is working and what isn’t. If you have momentum, you can quickly change your course. But if you’re not striving to do better, getting started again will be very difficult.

Here is the second danger to this “being right” aspect; some people’s sole goal is to PROVE they are right. There is a big difference between “being right” and “proving your right.”

When you are looking at leaders to promote, make sure that you are evaluating how you know they are right most of the time. If you see that the person you’re considering for promotion (or hiring) is trying to prove they are right most of the time, then the odds are that they have the mindset of someone who “can’t be wrong.” This means that no matter what, it is important for them to always be the person who is right.

This attitude is in direct conflict with the earlier point (fail early) because to them, failure is not an option. That’s a great sentiment for a movie line, but most often in the real world, failure is the only way to learn. A person with a mindset of “always being right” is not ever going to learn anything.

Your take away from today – make sure your team knows it’s okay to fail (but do it quickly and cheaply) and that from those failures, they learn to become right more often. If you hire/promote the right mindset, your organization will become great!

Don’t forget to sign up for a free workshop on November 15 from 11:15 am – 12:45 pm. The workshop will help you learn how to “Fix those “other” generations.”  Register here: http://generations.ezregister.com