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After the first two behaviours that I've discussed in the last two weeks' blogs, which centre around the concept of ideal leadership behaviours.

The third 1 is one of the most intriguing, as it seems to sit in opposite and against behaviour number one.

In the first blog in this little mini-series on behaviour one, I talked about speed of decision making as being a critical element to this.

And the Harvard Business Review article that this material is summarised it It's very clear about the importance of behaviour number one, and about the ability of leaders to make decisions confidently and quickly with approximately 70% of the information, but not waiting for perfect conditions.

The difficulty with this style of leadership and approach is that, inevitably and at times, you will make a mistake in the decision that you take.

To have an agile business and one which is prepared to experiment and act quickly and seize opportunities within the marketplace, it is inevitable that things will not go as planned.

The third behaviour, adapting proactively, is the ability to learn from mistakes, understand that mistakes are inevitable in some part, and embrace the opportunity to make things better from the information that the mistake has given.

This is where the term ‘growth mindset’ comes into play.

Trying something that doesn't work, and then learning and adapting to this, shows strength of leadership, and a clear and open mind that allows development, forward motion, and an empathic approach to the work of other people.

If the leader is prepared to admit and own up to their own mistakes and show how they have learned from those mistakes, it breeds a culture of safety and development, and one in which people are prepared to stretch themselves and to try things that they would not otherwise try.

Contrast that with an inability to learn from mistakes in a culture where mistakes are punished or looked down upon, and people will hide and be safe and never stretch themselves or put their head above the parapet.

As I write this blog this week, I'm preparing to start to promote our Digital Implant Dentistry Course, which centres around guided implant surgery.

This course has recently been developed by my friend and colleague Dominic Smithers in the practice, who is a young practitioner, heavily involved in digital dentistry.

The interesting part of this course, though (as I will talk about much more in the main blog), is that I wrote it in 2018, on a trip to China with Geitslich, the biomaterials company.

We had pioneered guided surgery in the practice, been one of the first practices in the United Kingdom to use the CEREC guide 2 guided surgery model, and presented guided surgery at two digital symposiums hosted by Henry Schein in the mid 2010s.

At that stage we were seen as one of the pioneers of this work in the United Kingdom, and so we felt it was time to provide a course for this which was extraordinary and would allow people to learn from what we had learned.

I wrote the outline for what I felt was extraordinary and would be presented over three days.

We booked and engaged some of the best speakers in the country at the time for that product, and we went to market.

Not a single person signed up.

I took the materials that I'd put together for this course and mothballed them in a vault, but we continue to develop and continue to move forward, and we included many of the materials in the existing courses that we provided.

The world has changed dramatically, and access to guided surgery has become so easy in the past eight years. It's time to reboot the course again, and Dominic has done an extraordinary job.

This is just one example of how to react to a circumstance where something doesn't go to plan. Learning from mistakes and learning from negatives, a critical, critical behaviour in business.