预计阅读本页时间：-
9
广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元
Failing and Learning at Work
IN A YEAR FILLED WITH DESPAIR, one of the few highlights for me was watching a bunch of grown men cry. There were women crying too, but I had seen that more often.
It was April 2016 and I was close to crossing the finish line on the Year of Firsts with three dreaded milestones still to go. My son’s first birthday without a father. My first wedding anniversary without a spouse. And a new unwelcome anniversary: the first anniversary of Dave’s death.
There were so many depressing firsts that I wanted to find a positive one for my kids, so I took them to Los Angeles to visit SpaceX’s headquarters. After failing on four previous tries, SpaceX was attempting to land a rocket at sea. Our invitation came from Elon Musk, the company’s CEO. The first time Elon and I crossed paths after Dave died, he told me how sorry he was and then added, “I understand how hard this is.” In 2002, Elon’s first child died suddenly at two and a half months old. We did not say much more and just sat together, bonded by grief.
On the day of the launch, my kids and I were on our feet along with a crowd of SpaceX employees in the company foyer. The countdown started on a large screen in front of us and the rocket in Florida took off on time. Everyone cheered. The rocket’s steering arms opened as planned. More cheers. Each time there was a visible success, SpaceX employees would high-five the team that had worked on that component and then everyone would cheer together.
As the rocket approached the drone ship to attempt the ocean landing, the tension in the room grew. The cheering stopped and the crowd got very quiet. My heart was racing and my daughter and son grasped my hands nervously. My daughter whispered to me, “I hope it doesn’t blow up!” I nodded, barely able to speak. As the rocket descended, three of the legs deployed but one lagged behind, tipping the rocket off target. The whole room leaned to one side as if trying to correct the position. Then the rocket tilted back and landed safely. The room erupted like a rock concert. Support crew, technicians, and engineers screamed and hugged and cried. My kids and I cried too. I still get chills thinking about it.
A few years ago, two management researchers became curious about what factors predict whether a space flight will succeed. Going back to the first launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957, they tracked every launch globally for nearly five decades across thirty organizations—mostly governments but also some private companies. You might think the best odds of a successful launch would come after past success, but the data from more than four thousand launches showed the exact opposite. The more times a government or company had failed, the more likely they were to put a rocket into orbit successfully on the next try. Also, their chances of success increased after a rocket exploded compared to a smaller failure. Not only do we learn more from failure than success, we learn more from bigger failures because we scrutinize them more closely.
Long before the water landing, the first time SpaceX attempted a launch, the engine caught fire thirty-three seconds after ignition and the rocket was destroyed. Elon had asked for the top ten risks in advance of the launch, and the problem that caused the failure turned out to be number eleven. Pro tip: ask for top eleven risks. The second launch failed for a relatively minor reason. The third launch would have succeeded if not for a tiny software bug. “I had basically assumed that we would have money for three attempts,” Elon reflected. “When that third failure happened, I was just shredded.” When my kids and I witnessed the successful water landing, the moment was even more meaningful because the triumph had followed so many disappointments.
Just as all people need resilience, all organizations do too. We see it in the companies that kept going after losing hundreds of employees on September 11. We see it in the businesses that rebound after financial crises and the nonprofits that regroup after losing donors. I saw it at the company Dave led, SurveyMonkey, when employees in the midst of grieving rallied around the hashtag #makedaveproud. When failures, mistakes, and tragedies happen, organizations make choices that affect the speed and strength of their recovery—and often determine whether they collapse or thrive.
To be resilient after failures, we have to learn from them. Most of the time, we know this; we just don’t do it. We’re too insecure to admit mistakes to ourselves or too proud to admit them to others. Instead of opening up, we get defensive and shut down. A resilient organization helps people overcome these reactions by creating a culture that encourages individuals to acknowledge their missteps and regrets.
Recently, this chalkboard was put up in the middle of New York City:
Of the hundreds of answers, most had one thing in common: the majority of regrets were about failures to act, not actions that failed. Psychologists have found that over time we usually regret the chances we missed, not the chances we took. As my mom often told me when I was growing up, “You regret the things you don’t do, not the things you do.”
At Facebook, we recognize that to encourage people to take risks, we have to embrace and learn from failure. When I joined the company, we had posters all over the walls that read, “Move fast and break things,” and we meant it. In 2008, a summer intern named Ben Maurer was trying to stop our site from crashing. Hoping to debug the problem, he decided to trigger the failure himself and accidentally brought Facebook down for thirty minutes. In Silicon Valley, an outage is one of the biggest debacles a company can face, but instead of criticizing Ben, our lead engineer announced we should deliberately trigger failures more often—although preferably in ways that don’t crash the site. He christened this practice “Ben Testing,” and we hired Ben full-time.
Facebook is a relatively young company, so our management team goes on a yearly visit to an organization with staying power. We’ve been to Pixar, Samsung, Procter & Gamble, Walmart, and the Marine Corps Base Quantico. At Quantico, we went through basic training. To get a taste of the experience, we ran at night with our gear while officers shouted at us. The shouting continued as we performed smaller tasks like making beds and turning faucets on and off with military precision. The next day, in teams of four, we had to move heavy bags over a wall without letting them touch the ground. This was challenging for tech types, who are more used to loading digital documents than loading cargo; very few of our teams completed any of the tasks. I wasn’t surprised that I failed at the physical challenges. What I didn’t expect was that I would fail at following a command to turn off a faucet.
Before Quantico, I never would have run a full debrief after an obviously disastrous performance. When things went wrong at work, it was important to me that the people responsible for the mistake acknowledge it. But once they did, sitting down together to discuss in excruciating detail how and why the mistake was made just seemed like piling on. I also worried that this level of scrutiny might discourage risk taking. I was surprised that after every mission—and even after every training session—the Marines do formal debriefs. Then they record the lessons learned in a repository so that everyone can access them.
The Marines taught me the importance of creating a culture where failure is seen as a learning opportunity. When done insensitively, debriefs feel like public flagellation, but when expected and required, they no longer feel personal. In hospitals, where decisions have life and death consequences, health-care professionals hold morbidity and mortality conferences. The purpose of “M&Ms” is to review the cases of patients where something went seriously wrong and figure out how to prevent similar problems in the future. The mistakes can range from a complication during surgery to an incorrect dose of a drug to a misdiagnosis of a disease. The discussions are confidential and evidence shows they can lead to improvements in patient care.
When it’s safe to talk about mistakes, people are more likely to report errors and less likely to make them. Yet typical work cultures showcase successes and hide failures. Just look at any résumé; I have never seen one with a section called Things I Do Poorly. Scientist Melanie Stefan wrote an article challenging her peers to be more honest in their CVs. Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer took her up on it and posted his failure résumé—a list that went on for two pages of rejections from degree programs, job openings, academic journals, fellowships, and scholarships. He later noted, “This darn CV of failures has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work.”
Convincing people to be more open about failure is not easy. Kim Malone Scott, who worked with me at Google, used to bring a stuffed monkey named Whoops to her team’s weekly meetings. She would ask colleagues to share mistakes from that week and then they’d all vote for the biggest screwup. The “winner” got to keep the stuffed monkey on their desk where everyone could see it until the next week, when someone else earned the honor. Nothing could have been a better reminder to try hard things and discuss failures openly. Probably the only member of the team who didn’t feel good about this exercise was Whoops, who never got a week off from being the symbol of imperfection.
Working with small businesses at Facebook has shown me that resilience is needed in organizations of all sizes. Damon Redd started the outdoor-clothing company Kind Design out of his basement in Colorado. When a flood filled his home with five feet of muddy water, he lost his designs, computers, and thousands of pieces of merchandise. He wasn’t in a flood zone so he didn’t have insurance to cover the loss. In an inventive effort to salvage damaged gloves, Damon power-washed and dried them, then started advertising them as “flood gloves.” He posted about how the gloves and other products like hats, shirts, and hoodies symbolized the durability of the people of Colorado and his brand. His posts went viral and he racked up sales in all fifty states, saving his business.
Teams that focus on learning from failure outperform those that don’t, but not everyone works in an organization that takes the long view. When that’s the case, we can try to find our own ways to learn. When Adam was in graduate school, he was terrified of public speaking. After his first interview for a teaching job, he was told that he would never make it in the classroom because he wouldn’t command enough respect from hard-nosed business school students. Professors are rarely taught how to teach, so to practice and improve, Adam volunteered to give guest lectures in other people’s classes. These were tough audiences: instead of a whole semester to build relationships, he had only an hour to win over students. At the end of every guest lecture, Adam handed out feedback forms, asking how he could be more engaging and effective. The comments were not fun to read. Some students reported that Adam seemed so nervous that he made them physically shake in their seats.
After these sweat-soaked guest lectures, Adam started teaching his own class. A few weeks into the course, he asked the students to write anonymous feedback. Then he did something several colleagues called insane: he emailed the full set of comments to the entire class. Another professor warned Adam that doing this would be like dumping fuel on a fire. But one of Adam’s colleagues, Sue Ashford, had taught him that gathering and acting on negative feedback is how you reach your potential. Sue’s studies show that although fishing for compliments hurts your reputation, asking for criticism signals that you care about improving.
Adam opened the next class with an analysis of the major themes in his students’ comments. Next, he shared how he would act on their feedback, like telling personal stories more often to bring concepts to life. Students were able to shape their own learning, and the class culture changed so that Adam was learning from them. A few years later, Adam became Wharton’s top-rated professor. Each semester he continues to ask students for feedback, then shares their comments openly and makes changes to his teaching approach.
We all have blind spots—weaknesses that other people see but we don’t. Sometimes we’re in denial. Other times we simply don’t know what we’re doing wrong. The people who have taught me the most in my career are the ones who pointed out what I didn’t see. At Google, my colleague Joan Braddi explained that I wasn’t as persuasive as I could be in meetings because I often jumped in to speak early. She said that if I could be more patient and let others express their views first, I could make my arguments better by addressing their concerns. David Fischer, who runs our global teams at Facebook, often reminds me that I need to slow down and listen more.
Sometimes feedback is hard to take. About four months after I lost Dave, I got a call from his poker buddy Chamath Palihapitiya, who used to work with me at Facebook. Chamath said he was coming over to take me for a walk. So I put on my collar and started pacing around near my front door. (Okay, not quite, but I was excited to see him.) I expected Chamath to check in on how my daughter and son and I were doing, but he surprised me by saying that he wanted to make sure I was still pushing myself at work. I looked at him in shock—and admittedly some anger. “You want me to do more? Are you kidding me?” I explained that it was all I could do just to get through each day without messing up too much. Chamath rejected that completely; he said that I could yell at him all I wanted but he would always be there to remind me that I still needed to set ambitious goals. He advised me, as only Chamath could, “to get back on the motherf***ing path.” Challenging someone like this could easily backfire, but Chamath knew me well enough to recognize that his blunt encouragement would provide a needed jolt of confidence—and remind me that I could fail by failing to try. He also inspired the only paragraph in this book that uses the f-word.
One of the best ways to see ourselves clearly is to ask others to hold up a mirror. “Top athletes and singers have coaches,” surgeon and author Atul Gawande reflects. “Should you?” In basketball, Gregg Popovich has coached the San Antonio Spurs to five NBA championships. After losing in the finals one year, he sat down with the team to review every single play of the previous two games and learn what they did wrong. “The measure of who we are is how we react to something that doesn’t go our way,” he said. “There are always things you can do better. It’s a game of mistakes.”
Sports teams are recognizing the importance of looking for players who can learn from failure. In 2016, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series after a 108-year drought. General manager Theo Epstein explained why: “We will always spend more than half the time talking about the person rather than the player….We would ask our scouts to provide three detailed examples of how these young players faced adversity on the field and responded to it, and three examples of how they faced adversity off the field. Because baseball is built on failure. The old expression is that even the best hitter fails seven out of ten times.”
In sports, taking suggestions from a coach is the whole point of practice. Adam traces his openness to feedback to his past as a Junior Olympic diver. Criticism was the only way to get better. When it was time for Adam to enter the classroom, he ditched the Speedo but kept the strategy. He turned his students into his coaches.
Accepting feedback is easier when you don’t take it personally. Being open to criticism means you get even more feedback, which makes you better. One way to lessen the sting of criticism is to evaluate how well you handle it. “After every low score you receive,” law professors Doug Stone and Sheila Heen advise, you should “give yourself a ‘second score’ based on how you handle the first score….Even when you get an F for the situation itself, you can still earn an A+ for how you deal with it.”
The ability to listen to feedback is a sign of resilience, and some of those who do it best gained that strength in the hardest way possible. I met Byron Auguste when I was an associate at McKinsey and we were assigned to work on the same project. The first African American director in the company’s history, Byron had a calmness that allowed him to see feedback as, in his words, “purely anthropological.” He later told me that this attitude comes in part from the trauma he suffered as a teenager. When Byron was fifteen, he was walking to dinner with his cousin, younger brother, and dad near their home in Phoenix. Out of nowhere, a drunk driver plowed into the group, breaking both of Byron’s legs. When he woke up in the hospital, his mother had to tell him the horrible news that his father was in a coma and his ten-year-old brother had died.
After the accident, Byron vowed not to become a problem for his grieving parents. He excelled in school all the way through earning a PhD in economics. What helped him build resilience the most, he told me, was overcoming pervasiveness: “Extreme compartmentalization may be my biggest superpower,” he said, laughing. If a project doesn’t turn out the way he wanted, Byron remembers that things could always be worse. “I say to myself and to others all the time, ‘Is anyone gonna die?’ That’s the worst—I’m not afraid of failure.”
Byron showed me that building resilient teams and organizations takes open and honest communication. When companies fail, it’s usually for reasons that almost everyone knows but almost no one has voiced. When someone isn’t making good decisions, few have the guts to tell that person, especially if that person is the boss.
One of my favorite posters on our office walls reads, “Nothing at Facebook is someone else’s problem.” In a company-wide meeting, I asked everyone facing challenges in working with a colleague—which is of course everyone—to speak more honestly to that person. I set a goal that we would all have at least one hard conversation each month. To help the conversations go well, I reminded everyone that feedback should always go both ways. I talked about how a single sentence can make people more open to negative feedback: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”
Now when I visit our offices around the world, I ask each team: Who has had at least one hard conversation in the past month? At first, very few hands went up. (And let’s face it: when I’m standing in front of them, my colleagues are more likely to overreport than underreport.) As I’ve persisted, I’ve seen more and more hands go up and some of our leaders have taken bold steps to make openness to feedback part of our culture. Carolyn Everson, who runs our global sales teams, shares her performance reviews in an internal Facebook group with 2,400 members. She wants her entire team to see how she’s working to improve.
As my Year of Firsts came to a close, I started thinking about one more hard conversation—a big one. Each year, I host a leadership day for women at Facebook. The previous year, I shared stories about my professional and personal fears and failures. I talked about times in my life that I felt truly unsure of who I was. I admitted to having made many bad decisions, including getting married and divorced in my early twenties and then going on to date a few wrong men. Then I talked about ending up in a true partnership with Dave. That year, my conclusion was: “Believing it will all work out helps it all work out.”
A year later, I was in a very different place. I also had a heightened awareness that others in the room were struggling too. One coworker’s mother was terminally ill. Another coworker was going through a difficult divorce. And those were just the two I knew about. I was sure that many were suffering in silence as we often do at work. I decided to open up in the hope that it might help others with hardships in their lives. I spoke about the three P’s and what deep grief felt like. I admitted that I had not understood how hard it was to be a single parent or to stay focused at work when you’re struggling at home. I was worried that I wouldn’t get through the speech without crying…and I didn’t. Still, by the end, I felt a sense of relief. In the weeks that followed, others at work started opening up as well. Together, we sent a bunch of elephants stampeding right out of our building.
One of the women in the room that day was Caryn Marooney. I knew Caryn had a big decision to make since we had recently offered her a promotion to run our global communications team. But that decision had become far more complicated. Caryn’s doctor had just told her that she might have breast cancer. She was waiting for test results but had already made up her mind that if her diagnosis was positive, she would not accept the promotion. “The combo of being afraid of failing in a new job and then being told you might have cancer was overwhelming,” she told me. Caryn didn’t feel comfortable discussing her medical issues at work; she didn’t want to burden anyone and was afraid of appearing weak. But after hearing me open up about my struggles in front of thousands of coworkers, she saw a glimmer of possibility.
The next week Caryn’s doctor confirmed that she had cancer and would require surgery and ongoing treatment. I asked her what she wanted to do about work and assured her that she had our full support no matter what she decided. She told me that meeting other patients made her realize how lucky she was that her cancer was caught at an early stage and that she worked for a company that gave her so much flexibility. She said she was scared but did not want to give up a role she’d been working toward for so many years. Together, we laid out a plan for her to take the new job.
“I had to jettison the notion of being a ‘fearless leader,’ ” Caryn said. Instead, the first time she addressed the two-hundred-person global communications team, she spoke openly about her diagnosis. She was undergoing daily radiation treatments, which were physically draining and made her forgetful. “In any version of picturing this moment—that fantasy of what you want to be—I would have been strong, smart, and inspiring confidence,” she told me. “I wanted to be a role model in that perfect ‘put together’ sense. Instead, I told them I had cancer and would need their support.”
Their response blew her away. Caryn’s teammates pulled together to help—and started sharing more of their own personal and professional challenges. Caryn believes that this openness made their work more efficient. “You’d think sharing would slow you down, but it takes time and energy to hide things,” Caryn said. Being more open personally led people to be more open professionally. Caryn’s team used to discuss “lessons learned” in one-on-one meetings, but most people were not comfortable discussing failure in larger groups. “Lessons learned” is now something that the full team has embraced. “Before, we used to talk about what went well,” Caryn said. “Now, we cover what went wrong too.”
Caryn powered through her own Year of Firsts. She has led the global communications team and made it through radiation. On her first day of treatment, I gave her a necklace with the letters “YGT.” She was confused at first since her initials are “CLM.” I explained that it was a symbol of my faith in her and stood for “You’ve got this.”
“I now say ‘YGT’ to my team all the time,” Caryn said. “And they say it to each other. YGT. It means so much.”
