Part of raising your game successfully is being willing to take risks. This is not about foolhardy madness, it is about stretching your boundaries, widening your repertoire and being willing to be courageous. It is learning from what goes well and what goes less well. The wisdom that comes through experience is about being willing to take risks, learning from them and embedding the lessons that come from taking measured risks well.
Unless you take risks you will never know the extent of your capabilities. It is being willing to take risks that will stretch those capabilities. High jumpers can stay jumping over the height they are comfortable with, but most will want to try one notch higher. In training, they are further refining their run-up and their technique as they throw themselves over the bar. High jumpers know that if they take reckless risks in their run-up or trajectory, they have no hope of reaching a personal best height. Success for an athlete is a combination of precision in training and preparation, combined with that willingness to stretch the boundary one step further.
Many of us do not want to risk failure or humiliation. The embarrassment of failure in front of our friends or peers can be devastating. Part of the answer lies in reframing what failure means. Viewed from a half empty perspective, failure is depressing and embarrassing. Viewed from a half full perspective, failure can be a learning experience from which you can take practical lessons to build into the next attempt.
Many of us can remember feeling humiliated in front of contemporaries at school. What helped then was encouragement from friends and parents. As adults we can suffer the same vulnerabilities. Remember, you still have people around you who will support and uphold you when you are falling on hard times.
Taking risks can sound a dangerous pastime. You shouldn't take risks when you're driving a car, for example. You don't take risks when you have inadequate preparation or foolhardy judgement. You must be clear about the outcomes you want to achieve; careful in identifying the opportunities and risks; and honest about your experience and abilities in dealing with a particular issue. Good risk assessment also means recognising the contribution that others make, assessing the probability of success, and being clear what the consequences are if the outcomes are not as desired.
Taking measured risks might involve applying an approach that has worked successfully in one situation to another (e.g. a presentation you had given has worked with one group and you would now like to try it with another). Other examples include asking another person to take the lead on a particular issue where you have taken the lead in the past; going outside your comfort zone in terms of speaking with a particular customers or partners with whom you have had limited previous dealings; or being willing to have difficult conversation about a subject that you have avoided in the past.
I encourage you to reflect on these questions:
When do you stay in your comfort zone and show great reluctance in moving outside it?
In what areas could you stretch the boundaries in terms of using your capabilities in new and different ways?
Who are the best people to encourage you to take some calculated risks?
Who will best support you if things go wrong?
How can you prepare yourself effectively to be willing to take some risks?
Judith Macgregor has held a series of senior posts within the UK Diplomatic Service. She talks of how she raised her game during her first year as a director. She comments:
I took some risks. If you always felt fully prepared there wouldn't be a risk. I was prepared to learn from others. I was seeking to make a difference through others. My aim was to get the team to magnify the actions which seemed most important.
Melanie Dawes has held a number of senior positions in UK government departments. She talks of her experience of stepping up into a director general role:
I was asked to step in suddenly and without preparation, and didn't feel like I was ready to be on the Board. I was surprised by how quickly I felt comfortable. My strength – spotting the strategic questions – worked at the new level and I made some quick wins. The difficult bit was finding the discipline to stop doing certain things. It also took me a while to stretch my ambition and realise how much more I could and should achieve at the new level. I brought in a very experienced HR director who helped me think more strategically. I have learned that my instincts can usually be relied upon – the key is to act on them, not to let things lie, and to embed that as a set of habits. Fully stepping up was a combination of stretching my strengths, getting better at making tough decisions and bringing the right discipline.
For Melanie, the first stage in stepping up was fully recognising her own strengths. She then forged new relationships externally and got other people to help her work out the strategic questions. She was stretching the boundaries by shaping thinking about the issues ever more effectively. She got into the right habits and attitudes of mind and was persistent in asking herself the key questions of:
To what extent am I stretching to fill this strategic space?
To what extent am I building people around me who complement my skills?
Melanie wanted to broaden her CV. She had only worked in one organisation and she took the risk of moving to another, leaving the comfort zone of the issues and people she knew. But this stepping out gave her new opportunities on which she was ready to seek to build. What helped were colleagues who supported her and people around her who were as excited as she was about trying to bring a new perspective to solve difficult technical and managerial issues.
Melanie's experience brings together the themes of building on your distinctive contribution, moving out of your comfort zone, taking difficult decisions and building new supporters. She took measured risks; the result was significant, personal growth as well as delivering outcomes in her job that led to promotion.
Sometimes not taking a risk is absolutely the right thing to do. When you stand back from the precipice you feel a sense of relief and release as a result of not being foolhardy. But sometimes you can regret not taking a risk. Finlay Scott tells a story of a Territorial Army soldier who was late for training because he had stopped to assist at a road traffic accident and the regular non-commissioned officer sent him home. Finlay regretted he had not intervened because he felt unempowered. The lesson for him was that when you see an injustice being committed, you must be willing to draw attention to the injustice, even if that involves risk.
Can I suggest the following as a useful exercise in assessing your own response to risks:
What recent risk do you regret not having taken?
What was the consequence of not taking the risk?
What held you back from taking the risk?
What might have enabled you to take a different view in addressing this risk?
How might you have been better prepared to take a decision about that risk in a different way?
What was the learning for you as a consequence of not taking the risk?
What would you do if the same situation arose again in the future?
