A leader’s job is to inspire their team. This is easy when things are going well. A good leader can keep morale up even when there’s bad news. But a great leader can find a way to use the bad news itself as inspiration.
I remember two years ago working at a financial services firm in an innovation group. John was the leader of the group. He started out the weekly team meeting by saying, “We got some news over the weekend. We redid our projections for the project launch and instead of the $50 million that Tony projected, we are only going to make $5 million in the first year.”