Whether you’re embarking on a summer internship, a new career, or a summer vacation, you can use your time away from campus to experiment and take risks. Great leaders embrace risk in order to promote change and innovation in their organizations. Courage and creative change are instrumental to one of the four quadrants of the Michigan Model of Leadership.
1. Reflect on courage and risk taking using these exercises.
2. Coach yourself.
To develop your tolerance for risk taking, create goals that let you work on new ideas, fill a new role, and/or that expose you to the possibility of failure. These questions can help you find such a focus area:
- What unsuccessful risks have you taken in the past and what, based on what you learned, would you do differently to decrease that risk?
- How can you setup your environment so you can fail fast, improve, and move on, minimizing the cost and maximizing the value of trial and error?
- What is your strategy and process for testing new ideas?
3. Build a team of advisors.
Seek out people who will support you through high-risk situations. Learn from their collective wisdom and emulate their actions during times when courage is called for.
For more detail on what types of people to include on your team of advisors, review this article from MIT Sloan.
With deliberate practice and reflection, you can learn and accomplish great things. We look forward to hearing about the risks you took and what you learned next fall!