The Right Way to Respond to Failure
From Peter Bregman over at Harvard Business Review Blogs comes a story with a lesson everyone – literally, everyone – can use for the first time or, if you’re really lucky, be reminded of:
Nothing we said seemed to have any impact on her. Nothing changed her expressionless stare. Nothing helped.
Then her grandmother Mimi walked over.
We were all standing over Dana, when Mimi moved through us and sat down next to her. She put her arm around Dana and just sat there quietly. Eventually, Dana leaned her head on Mimi’s shoulder. After a few moments of silence Mimi kissed Dana’s head and said, “I know how hard you work at this, honey. It’s sad to get disqualified.”
At that point, Dana began to cry. Mimi continued to sit there, with her arm around Dana, for several minutes, without saying anything.
Eventually Dana looked up at Mimi, wiped her tears, and said, simply, “Thanks Mimi.” And I thought, every leader, every manager, every team member, should see this.
There’s a huge, huge lesson here, and I myself am guilty of ignoring it.
Often, when someone fails, we think the right thing to do is put their failure in context, offer words of encouragement, or try to re-frame their disappointment as a lesson on how the future holds opportunity for improvement. I do it with my son after he has a bad soccer game, and I bet you’ve done it recently too. You can probably even remember with whom and what the particular topic was.
Except that it’s right-hearted but wrong-headed, because it removes the implication of trust in the person that failed. It doesn’t allow us to be with the
person who failed in the spirit of the failure. Instead, it tries to move the failure into another context as soon as possible, probably prematurely and redundantly.
Why redundantly? They know they failed. They know there will be other chances. They know they can work on not failing again.
All this they know.
What they don’t necessarily know is that you empathize with them and are smart enough to know they know they will get better.
Sometimes, we like to make things more complex than they need to be. We love over-pragmatizing things in the spirit of comfort. In today’s culture, a loose end unsalved is a problem unsolved, and we do our best to solve it.
Even when people don’t want us to. We do it because, ironically, it makes us more comfortable.
We can all learn a thing or two from Mimi. I know I can.
###
MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing inPeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) andBusiness Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitteror Facebook, we’d love to have you.
More opinion posts.
