WHITNEY JOHNSON
Fear of failure can be personally and professionally debilitating. As quoted in Ellen Galinsky's "Mind in the Making: the Seven Essential Life Skills Every Child Needs," Dr. Megan Gunnar of the University of Minnesota, an expert on stress and coping in children, says that people must learn to fail so that they can learn to succeed. She explains, "If you never allow your children to exceed what they can do, how are they going to learn to manage adult life, where a lot of it is managing more than you thought you could?" The same is true in the workplace: If employees never have the opportunity to surpass what they can already do, or think they can do, how will they manage?
When staffers are doing the work they really want to do and hoping to triumph professionally, they will likely experience failures, and experience them repeatedly. And they'll be in good company. According to Columbia University professor Amar V. Bhide,
for 90 percent of all successful new businesses, the founders'
initial business strategy didn't lead to their organizations' success. Meanwhile, Fritz Grupe, creator of
MyMajors.com, which offers advice to prospective students about various fields of study, has discovered that 80 percent of college-bound students have yet to choose a major, and "50 percent of those who do declare a major, change majors - with many doing so two and three times during their college years." That's a lot of intermediate failures, or at the very least, detours, before arriving at success.
One way employees can practice learning to fail is by tackling challenges head-on. Singapore has become one of the world's leaders in math education partly because students are given assignments they don't know how to complete. In the words of George Polya,a Hungarian mathematician and educator, people need to build processes to find "a way out of difficulty, a way around an obstacle, attaining an aim, which is not immediately attainable."
Meanwhile Google encourages its engineers to allocate 20 percent of their time to personal projects, which, according to Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, accounted for 50 percent of Google's new launches in 2005. One of Google's corporate mantras is "innovation, not instant perfection." Whether selecting a major or devising a business plan, what some might consider a failure is often a learning tool.
High achievers who are willing to fail possess certain earmarks. Human resources professionals can often ferret them out by asking questions such as: Have you gone out for a team, auditioned for a role or applied for a job for which you were qualified but didn't get? Did you try again? Have you ever been hired to do a job for which you were you were unqualified? What happened? Have you started a business that folded, and then started another one? Ask prospective hires what they consider their proudest failure and why.
Of course employees will experience interim failures when they are managing their careers or helping to build businesses. But if they are given opportunities to practice failing, it will become less frightening, and they will get better at iterating their way out of it. If their colleagues, customers and especially their subordinates can watch them practice taking on challenges and sometimes failing, all the better. When they learn to fail, they'll know how to succeed.
(Whitney Johnson is a founding partner of Rose Park Advisors. Previously, she was a double-ranked Institutional Investor analyst at Merrill Lynch, covering both telecom and media in the emerging markets.)
Harvard Management or Harvard Business : © (2010) Harvard Business Review Publishing/ Distributed by New York Times Syndicate.
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