Leaders: Failure and your career
There is a podcast, Spectacular Failures, which digs into well-known business collapses. It grabbed me, and I have jumped right into it, but part of me feels unsettled about the public gaze on moments in people's lives and careers where things went so wrong. For my part, even as a kid, I was raised to try to learn how to fail. This was confusing advice, but ultimately foundational as I explored, tried new things and adjusted in my career. Never easy, failure has served as a way to free me up for something new.
Let go of perfection. I like to push myself and my team to innovate and to go further. That means everyday things might not hit the right note, or be polished enough. How I look at that is to focus on the lesson and the refinement. Moving quickly, working in a high volume, yields a momentum and level of productivity which can be a competitive advantage. Startups often celebrate the glory of failing fast. I personally find this mythical notion of failure to be about as realistic as unicorns. The reality of failure is less than glamorous and much messier and complicated. It involves usually a team of people. It can cost people in many ways (revenue, jobs, credibility). And it’s sometimes too subtle to spot. What I have learned is not to focus on failing fast, but to be clear on the objectives of the activity and needs of the people we’re trying to help.
Clarity of objectives. I once was traveling to different offices on a roadshow sharing updates on new technology to come. My given objective at the time was to tell everyone what they were getting, and to prepare them for the changes ahead. I was to do it in 3 groups of users. The first pilot group I went out and “sold” them on the changes as I was instructed to do. When the technology rolled out people were super frustrated and felt blindsided. We as presenters failed the users in the first group. We were focused on immediate feedback on our presentation, rather than the overall adaptation of the users to the changes they’d encounter during the hard cut. The next phase we decided to change the messaging to reflect the frustrations and challenges they’d encounter, with distinct workarounds to help them through it. With this “reality check” messaging, the presenters were uniformly disliked. Most presenters switched back to the selling mode, since it felt awful to walk into a room and tick people off, and it felt like they argued the second method wasn’t working so they said they would “fail fast.” I was focused on the greater objective and goal of helping users have the clarity and information they needed to understand the changes and impact. This time when the technology was rolled out, those office es with the “difficult” and seemingly “bad” presentations had higher adoption of technology, higher satisfaction, and higher retention. If you had to walk into a room, would you choose the easy happy pitch or the more grueling “dose of reality?”
Keep swimming. When I feel I’ve missed the mark I feel frustrated with myself. I feel ashamed. I feel I’ve let the team down. All those feelings could result in me grinding to a halt. So I’ve learned that like Dory, the act of staying in motion and getting back up on that horse (so many mixed metaphors!) is vital. Meeting didn’t go well? Personally connect with people (don’t avoid them or ignore it) and talk about what to do next time. Email have a typo? There will be more emails to send —trust me—so you can do your best to proofread or have a colleague look it over. Don’t avoid or obsess over it. Be clear on what went wrong (and right) and immediately have a plan for what’s next. People can and should think about your resilience, continuous improvement and productivity.
