Learning From Failure: Supporting Growth Within Your Team Through Their Mistakes
I’ll never forget feeling like an utter failure in my second real job. Since I had excelled in technology and process in my first real job, I thought this new role — which involved managing the development of a customer-facing website — would play to my strengths. But the job turned out to be much less about technology and much more about design and customer preferences. I felt out of my depth sitting through meetings about colors, fonts, layouts, and customer utility.
The lead engineer for the website would watch me in those meetings. I figured he thought I was pathetic…until one day, he quietly approached me in my office and handed me a book, Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte.
“I bought you this,” he said. “Your inexperience in this material is hurting you and the team. But I’m with you, and I think you can do this.”
Sixteen years later, I still get emotional recalling that day, to know someone was for me, even while he spoke truth to me.
Truth Spoken in Judgment and Rejection
Contrast that with another big fail I had a few years later. I was excited to facilitate a training program for a group from a big-name company. During the session, I noticed that the leader of the group, who was sitting in the back of the room with crossed arms, occasionally smirked and whispered to the person next to him. But I thought the program went fine. They did not.
They waited to tell me I was failing until several days after the program. Well, actually, they didn’t tell me directly at all. They called someone else in our company to say that I was inexperienced, elementary, and contrived…and that they didn’t want to talk with me again.
Thirteen years later, I still get emotional recalling that day, to know someone had so rejected me.
Those two stories represent two ends of the truth-telling spectrum. At one end, truth is spoken in the spirit of encouragement and support; at the other, in judgment and rejection.
Have you ever been told the truth in a spirit of judgment and rejection by someone you care about? It can be one of the most hurtful and damaging things they can do to you. It feels like you’ve been abandoned.
On the other hand, truthful feedback from someone who is clearly for you is one of the most rewarding and impactful things someone you care about can do for you. It feels like you have a partner.
We All Need More Partnership
So why is it, then, that even when we have the courage and time to tell the truth, we so often abandon others rather than partner with them through truth-telling feedback?
As leaders of any kind who play a role in giving feedback to and gaining the compliance of others — bosses, parents, children, friends — why don’t we acknowledge the truth of what’s not going well while emphasizing that we are for the other person?
In his book Boundaries for Leaders, psychologist Henry Cloud points out that this is a requirement for leaders:
As the person in charge of setting emotional boundaries, your job is twofold. First, do everything possible to create “good fear,” the positive performance anxiety that activates healthy stress, the drive that says, “If I get with it, I can get something good and avoid something bad.” Second, diminish destructive fear, which is communicated through tone, lack of structure, and the threat of relational consequences — anger, shame, guilt, and withdrawal of support. People need to know that you are going to be “for” them, even when they don’t do well.
Perhaps that’s why the first principle in Dale Carnegie’s manifesto on human relationships is Don’t criticize, condemn, or complain. He is not saying, Don’t tell the truth, give feedback, or be honest. He’s saying, Strong human relationships depend upon people knowing that the other is for them.
Who needs to know the truth from you? Tell them. And make sure they know that you are for them.
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