I came across this article on HBR by Scott Edinger recently and wanted to share it, the title is Get Ready to Fail - you can find the full article below
In the article Scott does a great job in providing some common themes around failure and mistakes and whilst the article is aimed towards leadership I think this is something that affects us all at some point. Whether it's forgetting someone's birthday, losing your keys or we forget to keep one of stakeholders engaged or miss a deadline. No matter how small or how big the mistake - we all make them.
The piece that the articles misses to express explicitly in my opinion is that making mistakes and failure is a huge part of the learning process. If we didn't make mistakes then we wouldn't learn from them and do things better or change our approach and improve what we do and how we do it.
Taking this back to the workplace I think culture plays a large part in how failure is both viewed and dealt with as you often here things like "blame culture" and that failure is something to avoid at all costs. What does this say about how failure is viewed within an organisation or by individuals, what impact would this have on trying something new or different or anything that was a potential risk.
Accountability plays a big part here as do behaviours both on the part of the individual and organisation when dealing with failure. Is failure looked at as an opportunity to provide coaching, feedback and learn from the process - even celebrated to some extent; or is failure viewed as exactly that - failure and once you've made a mistake there is no hope for you and any sort of responsibility is removed until you can prove yourself again?
OK two extremes but I believe you can tell a lot about an organisation and an individual in how they react and deal with failure which in turn will have a dramatic impact on the culture.
Whilst failing is never a nice thing I re-iterate it's a critical part of the learning process and for me an opportunity to get feedback, learn from it and come back stronger.
What do you think? Do you learn through failure? How do you deal with it?
What about your organisation, is failure deemed as negative or seen an as opportunity?
Replies
Hi Mike, The link needs fixing. Should be http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/get_ready_to_fail.html
The biggest factor that is at play here is best summed up by Carol Dweck's work on mindset, specifically, does some have a fixed or growth mindset. And does the general culture have a fixed or growth mindset?
Grab her book on Mindset from Amazon. I tell people it is a more important read than even my book on Capability, so it must be good!
Fixed mindset people consider failure anathema, and a permanent stigma, so being seen to fail should be avoided at all costs.So don't attempt stuff if you might fail, and cover things up or blame others when you do.
Growth mindset people see failure as a temporary setback that can be learnt from. be open about failure and use it as a stepping stone to being better.
Cheers, Paul
Fixed thanks Paul :)
Thank you for posting this Mike. (I know it was a while ago, but it's relevant to me now.)
I am currently trying to think of how I can help to overcome a blame culture between engineers and operators when things go wrong on the production lines.
Operators say engineers don't set up the machinery properly, engineers say they have the equipment running perfectly but operators don't run it properly. There have probably been isolated incidents where each of these has clearly been the case, but I doubt that either ops or engineers are in a position to generalise and point the finger.
I'd like to see us all working together towards the same end, without blame, but for some reason (that I haven't yet identified) this doesn't happen.
[It could be due to frustration felt by the dept managers who are held accountable at the accountability tracker board (daily morning meeting), which is then vented onto their respective staff who feel "blamed" and become defensive.] We do always carry out a root cause analysis when things go wrong - we have a QMS in place and in use - and we hopefully learn from the investigations.
I am looking at the problem from the perspective of ensuring that sufficient effective training is provided, which is then supplemented with individual coaching as needed. It's really hard to know where to start though. All our operators and engineers are, on the face of it, trained and signed off as competent to do their work.
I have decided to use a risk based approach by asking the engineers for a plant list identifying a) plant that if it goes down would have a big impact on production and b) identifying plant that frequently goes down causing a nuisance through frequent (if minor) disruptions.
Then I'm going to work with the relevant operators to see whether they think there is any tacit knowledge that hasn't been shared through the training mechanism that we use (SOPs only provide training on how to operate when everything is working as it should, so perhaps we need an extra piece of training material).
If there is (which is possible) then I'm going to see if we have sufficient in house expertise to deliver a training package on those aspects, or whether I need to involve the equipment manufacturers. Once I have gone through this, I will run a similar exercise with the engineers. I will move down the prioritised list of equipment.
I wonder if anyone else has been through anything like this and how they resolved it?
I am hoping that by bringing the reason for my work into the open, and openly discussing the blame culture that I have heard about, I can help to rid the site of it.
I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts on my proposed approach and any other ideas.....
many thanks all - over to you now!
Came across this article today and it links to the accountability piece wonderfully. very interesting topic as everything discussed and in the below article has a BIG impact on performance management, reward and recognition.
Build a Culture of Accountability