Assignment 1 MGT 5500 Essay

Words: 2218
Pages: 9

Assignment 1, The Value of Failure in Leadership
Trenise S. Palmer
Dr. Laura Poluka
MGT 550, Leadership Strategies
October 24, 2014

Failure is something that we cannot go through life without experiencing. The best thing about failure is that failure can be used as a great learning experience to improve upon things in our lives and career. Using failure as a learning tool is dependent upon the person and how they view it as well as how they use it. Failure is a matter of perspective and the lessons in failure are important aspects towards growth and development. If we did not experience failure there wouldn’t be opportunities for learning. Failure can teach us about ourselves as well as provide an understanding for our
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For example, I heard that years ago when Michael Jordan was in high school he was cut from the basketball team because his coach did not feel that he had the skill and talent to play basketball. Michael Jordan let this personal failure help him to grow and achieve greatness in the sport. He did not let his failure in high school prevent him from achieving his goals; but instead allowed it to inspire him to become one of the greatest basketball players today. There are many leaders today that will also say that before becoming a great leader they had to experience failure and setback in their journey. For this paper I conducted an interview with a woman by the name of Cathy Waever, a senior VP with St. Francis Hospital in Wilmington Delaware. When I spoke with her about failure and leadership she offerred some encouraging view points regarding this topic. Cathy stated that in her own personal experience she has experienced failure and with those failures she gained opportunities for analysis and reflection. She states that failure gave her the chance to problem solve and analyze the weaknesses that existed in her decision making. One statement she made and I found to be interesting would be that “Failure is always’s present, but is not an option”. The reason that I found this to be interesting is because failure is always present and we can make our own decisions that guide us towards success or