Leadership is a Relationship

CHAPTER 2Forgiveness Every Day (Forgiveness)

The language of leadership often focuses on building, whether that's hiring new people, teaching kids how to develop strong habits, or getting more patrons to eat at your restaurant. In all kinds of pursuits, we talk a lot about creation, production, development, and more.

This chapter is different. It's about preparing for what happens when things go wrong—sometimes very, very wrong. There are plenty of processes for assessing and dismissing employees; for extracting “low performers” from organizations and hiring exciting replacements; for cutting “bad influences” out of our lives. There's no organizational process for looking another human being in the face and saying, “I messed this up. I'm sorry, and this is what I'm going to do differently from now on.” There's no best practice for responding with, “I hear you, and I want to move forward together.”

This is the hard, uncomfortable work of leading through relationships. Accountability doesn't prevent failure. Every relationship will stall, sputter, and have dark days. Many include the pain of disappointment and betrayal. Those are the moments when it's easiest to doubt the importance of relationships and of specific people in our lives. When people let us down, it's easy to wonder if things would go more smoothly alone. But it's also the time when great leaders choose to sit with discomfort and meet it with humble love. We don't mean the forgiveness that comes when someone arrives ...