Many nonprofit leaders struggle at times with their regrets, myself included. When social sector leaders make a mistake, people often suffer. It’s one thing to make an error in judgement and lose some market share selling toothpaste; its another thing when people end up homeless, hungry, impoverished, or even dead. Yet mistakes are inevitable. How can a nonprofit leader make peace with those that he or she makes?
One of my wife’s favorite lines in a James Bond movie is Judi Dench, playing the spymaster M, saying, “Regret is unprofessional.” Yes! But while that’s nice to say, what happens when regret overcomes you? In my recent book Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind, I recount my sadness and alarm when a legendary nonprofit leader confided in me soon before he retired that he was launching a new project not as a capstone to a distinguished career but as one final chance to do something successfully.
I have many small regrets over the course of my two decades of running nonprofits: phone calls not returned fast enough (or at all), bad hires, sharp words where softer ones would have been better, speeches that fell flat, programs that should have been shuttered earlier, and donor pitches that missed the mark. And then there are the big ones, like an interview for “60 Minutes” that I overprepared for and messed up (resulting in it never airing on television) and two big grant proposals that we were overconfident about which ended up incoherent and misaligned with donor interests (and as a result, not funded).
However, despite my many flaws as a professional and a human being, only rarely am I truly haunted by my errors. When something brings them to mind, my reaction is more “Aw, shucks” than harsh self-reproach. If I give it more than a fleeting thought, I typically reflect on what that mistake taught me, and how I became a better professional as a result. I don’t see myself being at the end of my career and minimizing my accomplishments like the leader I mentioned above.
In their essential book Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know, my friends Susan Davis and David Bornstein wrote this about social entrepreneurs: “They don’t take failure as an indication of personal inadequacy but as an indication of a gap in their understanding.” Whenever I made a mistake or failed, I tried to focus more on what I learned from it than what it cost my cause. In other words, how it helped close a gap in my understanding.
In fact, my two recent books – the semi-autobiographical Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind and the more handbook-like When In Doubt, Ask for More: And 213 Other Life and Career Lessons for the Mission-Driven Leader – can be thought of as efforts to synthesize my top learnings from the mistakes I made and the failures I experienced. In trying to convey them to a new generation of changemakers, they may serve the missions of organizations I never even come into contact with or understand.
Regret, though to some degree inevitable, really is unprofessional. Try turning your miscues into opportunities to grow and to teach. Your well-being and that of the people and organization you lead will be much better served whenever you do so. Trust me on this one.