Talking about failure is crucial for growth

Research shows it makes for happier, more productive workers.

We’ve all flopped on a big presentation.

After weeks of careful preparation and practice, you feel ready to knock it out of the park. But the day comes and, for whatever reason, every joke seems to fall flat, you bumble through all your numbers and your technology seems to be working against you.

The embarrassment and blow to your self-worth can manifest in unlimited ways — and sometimes it feels like it’s manifesting in all ways — and our bodies’ response to failure can even mimic that of physical pain, Bradley Staats, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Flagler Business School, writes in “Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself and Thrive.”

“We respond that way, and then we feel bad about responding that way, and so we try to cover it up instead of learn from it,” Staats said. “We shouldn’t be ashamed of the reaction. It is natural.”

Even though most people prefer to process failure internally and quickly move on for fear of causing a scene or seeming unprofessional, taking the time to reflect on and communicate about unwanted outcomes can go a long way in creating more congenial, trusting and ultimately productive workplaces. it.But first, we have to talk about

Talking about failure 101

After failing — publicly or privately — it can be nerve-racking to initiate a conversation about what happened with your coworkers or boss, particularly if you’re still in the early stages of your career and don’t feel confident that you have a lot of professional capital to work with.

“I believe that almost everyone can benefit from sharing and hearing another perspective,” said Tasha Eurich, a Denver-based organizational psychologist. “It’s healthy to ask about what went wrong in a meeting. You have to engage other people in that process of learning.”

It can be tempting to hide behind the safety blanket of Slack or email, but having face-to-face conversations around failure can be especially effective in building stronger relationships among colleagues. The ability to convey tone, body language and other non-linguistic reactions often plays a positive and humanizing role in these conversations, and

all of that is lost in email, Staats said.

It’s also worth putting thought into how you frame the incident: A longwinded, venting session can be cathartic, but it also has the potential to sound selfcentered or melodramatic.

“Instead of telling a story of how horrible things went, frame it as, ‘Can you help me with this?’” Staats said. “We see that when you ask others questions, most people actually want to help.” He added that by asking a question, “we activate in them that spirit of helping.”

It goes both ways. When our co-workers ask us questions, we’re more likely to develop a positive opinion of them because we see that they’re humbly turning to us as someone they perceive as having valuable knowledge, according to Staats.

“When that happens, you actually take it as a compliment,” he said.

Use your failures to make friends

In a new working paper, co-author Alison Wood Brooks, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, found that discussing failures can help to humanize the sharer by making them seem more approachable and relatable in the workplace. It also generally increased levels of so-called “benign envy,” which can motivate and drive employees to perform better.

However, the enemy of benign envy, according to the paper, is “malicious envy”: The type of envy others feel when we talk about our achievements much more often than our struggles. Projecting that image of perfection can be especially harmful for those in leadership positions who risk coming across as disingenuous, Brooks and her colleagues found.

A simple way to understand this is to look at the polished-though-unrealistic lives many of us present on social media.

“On Instagram and Facebook, people post these curated, shiny, beautiful personas of themselves, which contributes to this general belief that other people don’t experience as many failures as we do,” Brooks said.

Ultimately, the researchers found that talking about failure — both during the fact and afterward — can help to cultivate closer relationships with colleagues.

Fail productively

Other than helping you seem more approachable and likable, talking about failure and encouraging your peers to do the same can also make you a more efficient worker.

Amy Edmondson, a professor in leadership and management at Harvard Business School, has studied three different kinds of failures: preventable failure, complex failure and intelligent failure.

The latter two have the greatest potential to promote learning in the workplace.

“Complex failures occur when we have good knowledge about what needs to be done. We have processes and protocols, but a combination of internal and external factors come together in a way to produce a failure outcome,” Edmondson said. “These kinds of failures happen all the time in hospital care, for example, where there’s enough volatility or complexity in the environment that things just happen.”

Edmondson added that it’s difficult to assign responsibility for complex failures, but that staying vigilant about these kinds of mistakes can help improve existing processes.

Similarly, intelligent failure occurs when we’re working in areas in which we don’t have expertise or experience, or in areas that are uncharted in a broad, industrywide sense.

“We might launch a new product that’s never been launched before, and it’s a failure. We should tell everybody!” Edmondson said.

When an intelligent failure is buried or goes undiscussed, others risk repeating the exact same mistakes. The result? Increasingly inefficient organizations that replicate, instead of learn from, the same mistakes.

According to Sara Canaday, executive coach and author of “You — According to Them,” the rise of startup businesses has made it much more acceptable to openly celebrate intelligent failure.

“Suddenly, people are saying things like, ‘fail fast or fail forward.’ Those are brand new words in the nomenclature of business,” she said.

By linking resiliency to innovation and growth, startups contribute to a general professional culture that frames failure as a positive learning experience. Likewise, many hiring managers are increasingly looking for resiliency in job candidates. That means it can be in your best interest to thoughtfully embrace the too-common interview question about a time you failed at work and how you overcame the challenge.

Eurich recalls an interview process in which a candidate was unable to acknowledge or reflect on any professional mistakes he had made.

“Against my advice, they hired him anyway,” she said. “He ended up being one of the most problematic employees both from a performance perspective and a legal perspective. Screening people around us for their willingness to talk about their failure is so important.”

Know your audience

Even when you grow comfortable with the prospect of sharing your failures at work, it’s important to remember that not every company has a culture that will welcome or even tolerate this kind of openness.

That’s not to say employees can’t create “safe spaces” among themselves to share their struggles. In fact, Edmondson encourages it, but factors like seniority are likely to impact how conversations about failure are received.

In a recent article, Brooks talked about the Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer, who published a “CV of Failures,” composed of a long list of “positions, grants and awards” that he had unsuccessfully applied for.

Haushofer said he first wrote the CV in 2010 “in response to a friend not getting something they tried out for, to comfort them.”

“In 2016,” he said, “somebody close to me didn’t get an opportunity they wanted, so I updated it and sent it to them, too. It seemed to get a positive response, so I kept updating it.”

In fact, most of the positive emails he has received since putting the CV of Failures on his website have come from younger doctorate students, who have expressed relief at finding solidarity for their struggles.

“If a first-year Ph.D. student who is relatively unknown published a CV of their failures, well, it might not work as well,” said Brooks. She acknowledged that talking about failure is riskier for young professionals across the board, but said that if junior workers find the right audience — namely people who are professional peers, not superiors — to talk about failures with, the trust-building and humanizing benefits are worth it.

“If you’re having lunch with some of your peers, then revealing failure is a great strategy to induce levels of liking by reducing malicious envy,” Edmondson said.

Opening up about that presentation gone awry can be a gamble, but it’s one worth making as long as you’re making it intentionally. (Especially if you’re sick of getting left off the post-work happy hour email invite.)