Love, love, love this story from the Wall Street Journal about Managing Your Career. It profiles three mega-CEO’s – Myron Ullman of JC Penney, Peter Peterson of Blackstone, and Jeffrey Hollander of Seventh Generation and the mistakes they have made that helped them reach their personal pinnacles of success.

Too often, CEOs and other leaders who seek to raise their profiles to enhance corporate reputations think that this means they must put a perfect foot forward at all times, like robotic executives who do everything right all the time.

The real sign of a leader is one who acknowledges her mistakes, and learns from them. And the real sign of character is candor about those mistakes, which enables others to learn, too.

Carreen Winters can be reached at cwinters@mww.com.

cwinters General Corporate Leadership, mistakes