The dent and the crater

"The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills." — Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929) Hemingway wasn't writing about leadership but he might as well have been. Some of the senior leaders I've worked with have taken serious dents over their careers. The board that turns. The launch that lands flat. The cofounder who walks. The round that doesn't close. The dents come with the job. The question is what's there a year later: a place you went back to and got strong at, or a crater you've been quietly walking around since. The crater is the part that doesn't make the leadership playbooks. The bad year doesn't get you on its own. The silent processing of the experience afterwards does, the quiet work of making sure that bad year can't happen again. You start showing up to meetings already half-armoured. You stop trusting the kind of decision that hurt you the last time. You add a layer of process around the…