I signed up to run the Country Music Half Marathon in January. The big race was on Saturday, April 28th. But I didn’t run.

With the launch of my new book, Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World, and several other projects in the works, I just didn’t have the time to do the distance training I needed to do in order to participate. (I have kept up with my normal running routine; I just haven’t done the extended distance work.)

Rainy days. Flat tires. The worst case scenario. As the saying goes, it happens. And so does poor leadership.

Leadership failures are often the result of:

• Poor planning
• Inexperience
• Stubbornness
• Lack of vision
• Pride

It happens more often than we would like to admit, especially when it is our fault.

In 1986 I started my own publishing company with Robert Wolgemuth. We had worked together at Word, Inc. and then at Thomas Nelson. Like a lot of young entrepreneurs, we had a big dream, a business plan, but few resources.

We raised enough money from investors to launch the company, but we were still strapped for cash. Regardless, we soldiered on, believing that God would bless our creativity, hard work, and commitment to excellence.

No one is perfect. No one can be right 100 percent of the time (even if you are Jack Welch or Steve Jobs), including an organization’s leaders. But there are mistakes, and then there are MISTAKES.

I have found 10 basic essentials that all leaders should have on their list entitled “things to avoid at all costs,” lest they end up on the wrong end of a no-confidence Board vote, a Shareholder lawsuit, or worst of all, an SEC subpoena.

Recently, I made an early morning phone call to one of my direct reports to own a blunder on my part. Not a great way to start the day. If you’ve ever blown it as a leader you know that these conversations are never fun. It’s humbling.

Great leaders hold those they lead accountable. But those we lead must see us as holding ourselves accountable as well. If we expect them to “own it” when they make mistakes, we need to first model this for them.

I lamented that I’d let weeds take over my flowerbeds. I didn’t have garbage can space, and my composter died in a windstorm, so I was left with a pile of uprooted weeds. They screamed failure to me.

That is, until God whispered, “You can compost them right there. They can mulch the dry soil. Provide natural fertilizer.”

There’s an old proverb that’s states, “Like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly” (Proverbs 26:11). But what if we could better prepare ourselves to stay away from folly all together, yet alone repeat it?

As I turned the corner from my 20s and entered into my 30s I realized how much I thought I knew, when in reality I knew nothing. I began to find myself as the fool repeating his folly in so many leadership decisions I was making.

In 1991 I, along with my business partner, suffered a financial meltdown. We had built a successful publishing company, but our growth outstripped our working capital. We simply ran out of cash.

For a while our distributor funded us in the form of cash advances on our sales. But eventually, their parent company wanted those advances back. Although we didn’t officially go bankrupt, the distributor essentially foreclosed on us and took over all our assets.

One of the most important parts of being an effective leader is building trust.

We have all had a boss that we did not respect. No matter how intelligent or charismatic, you knew that placing blind faith in him or her would be a mistake. You were always watching your back waiting for the sucker punch to come.

Using social networking to promote our ideas or to sell a product or a vision can be a dangerous thing. It is so easy to fall into the whale’s mouth and exaggerate, inflate, or cover over the broken image of who we really are. In our eagerness to impress and sell, we can easily stumble and fall.

While projecting a too-good-to-be-true image may produce short-terms gains, it results in long-term disappointment. Eventually we can’t hide the truth of who we are. There is too much information already out there. The truth is that most of these people are just like you and me.