Talking About Failure Is Crucial for Growth
January 30, 2019 8:05 AM Subscribe
This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- loup
Seriously, I write so many terrible songs. Only a few make the cut.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:36 AM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:36 AM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]
I'm only here in between pomodoro sessions, so I haven't read the article yet, but I'm saving it for later for one reason: life has gotten much, much better for me ever since realizing that having the right language for a discussion/topic is crucial.
Most generally, this has been demonstrated by adopting new methods for, and diction when necessary, communicating with others whom I have some sort of relationship with....working, familial, romantic, etc. The way we frame things with language impacts how it is received, and over time influences our way of thinking and brain structure (the cortisol response is a helluva drug). Hopefully this article turns out to be as useful as I hope it will.
posted by Gatyr at 8:43 AM on January 30, 2019 [5 favorites]
Most generally, this has been demonstrated by adopting new methods for, and diction when necessary, communicating with others whom I have some sort of relationship with....working, familial, romantic, etc. The way we frame things with language impacts how it is received, and over time influences our way of thinking and brain structure (the cortisol response is a helluva drug). Hopefully this article turns out to be as useful as I hope it will.
posted by Gatyr at 8:43 AM on January 30, 2019 [5 favorites]
Seconding MysticMCJ - I *always* ask them to tell me about a time they made a mistake and had to recover. It's never failed me as an interview question.
posted by Mogur at 8:52 AM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by Mogur at 8:52 AM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
As a culture, we think of mistakes as this thing that needs to be swept under the rug, that should never be shown.
In some parts of the culture, yes, but entrepreneurship discussions and coverage seem absolutely rife with the idea that failure is inevitable.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:55 AM on January 30, 2019
In some parts of the culture, yes, but entrepreneurship discussions and coverage seem absolutely rife with the idea that failure is inevitable.
posted by Going To Maine at 8:55 AM on January 30, 2019
@witchen when I was a manager I would ask people what parts of the day-to-day worklife were a struggle to work up the will to perform. It's surprising how well you can load balance a team where people have strengths and "low effort to will" to do tasks that other people will be brought close to crying over having to perform and vice versa.
posted by nikaspark at 9:32 AM on January 30, 2019 [21 favorites]
posted by nikaspark at 9:32 AM on January 30, 2019 [21 favorites]
> What does failure look like for an attorney? It looks like disbarment, and that's a heck of a thing to mention at a job interview.
I don't think losing a winnable case due to human error can be found criminal or actionable unless the attorney had done it out of malice or bias, or they had been found repeating the same mistakes frequently.
> ...entrepreneurship discussions and coverage seem absolutely rife with the idea that failure is inevitable.
In my experience, techbro entrepreneurs tend to think in terms of "My failures are learning experiences that make me stronger, your failures are proof of your inadequacy."
posted by at by at 9:34 AM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]
I don't think losing a winnable case due to human error can be found criminal or actionable unless the attorney had done it out of malice or bias, or they had been found repeating the same mistakes frequently.
> ...entrepreneurship discussions and coverage seem absolutely rife with the idea that failure is inevitable.
In my experience, techbro entrepreneurs tend to think in terms of "My failures are learning experiences that make me stronger, your failures are proof of your inadequacy."
posted by at by at 9:34 AM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]
I think failure implies some level of risk accepted in advance, and also more emotional weight for the person attempting the thing than mistakes
This article was a bit frustrating because I think it glosses over the reasons we don't want to talk about failures: they make us look bad if we are not already successful or haven't already overcome them, or if people don't have empathy. Business is not always but can be cruel, petty, and status driven in many ways, and there are damn good reasons people learn not to open up and be vulnerable.
posted by ropeladder at 9:42 AM on January 30, 2019 [6 favorites]
This article was a bit frustrating because I think it glosses over the reasons we don't want to talk about failures: they make us look bad if we are not already successful or haven't already overcome them, or if people don't have empathy. Business is not always but can be cruel, petty, and status driven in many ways, and there are damn good reasons people learn not to open up and be vulnerable.
posted by ropeladder at 9:42 AM on January 30, 2019 [6 favorites]
This article was a bit frustrating because I think it glosses over the reasons we don't want to talk about failures: they make us look bad if we are not already successful or haven't already overcome them, or if people don't have empathy. Business is not always but can be cruel, petty, and status driven in many ways, and there are damn good reasons people learn not to open up and be vulnerable.
While it may very well be different at higher levels of employment for all I know, the imbalance of power at lower levels and the arbitrary use of that power imbalance makes me hesitant to open up about much of anything other than the most banal and common types of actions and thoughts one may have.
You have to guess what it is the person interviewing wants, figure out who they and their business might be in their practices and beliefs and protect yourself while trying to make an income to pay rent. Want an honest answer, be an honest business. If I ask you how previous employees have fared and what failings your business has had in dealing with them how honest do you think they'll be with me?
posted by gusottertrout at 9:49 AM on January 30, 2019 [10 favorites]
While it may very well be different at higher levels of employment for all I know, the imbalance of power at lower levels and the arbitrary use of that power imbalance makes me hesitant to open up about much of anything other than the most banal and common types of actions and thoughts one may have.
You have to guess what it is the person interviewing wants, figure out who they and their business might be in their practices and beliefs and protect yourself while trying to make an income to pay rent. Want an honest answer, be an honest business. If I ask you how previous employees have fared and what failings your business has had in dealing with them how honest do you think they'll be with me?
posted by gusottertrout at 9:49 AM on January 30, 2019 [10 favorites]
Apologies if this is mentioned further in the article but I didn't want to read beyond the paywall. A trend that I have seen grow more common in tech circles is the blameless postmortem which is basically a way of talking about a recent outage / late project / production bug / whatever thing is suboptimal and needs to be improved in a systemic way. We are all humans who work in systems. Humans are fallible, and invent systems to guard against our mistakes but sometimes the system itself creates or amplifies a mistake. So rather than point the finger at a person and say "you made a mistake and are a failure", we can talk about how "the system failed to catch a mistake so how should we improve the system?"
I've worked in startups or tech shops where this framework didn't exist and postmortem and retros would degenerate into finger pointing exercises that destroyed trust and added toxicity to politics. I don't think that blameless postmortems are perfect but the difference that they bring to process improvements illustrate the value of proper framing of the discussion.
posted by bl1nk at 9:57 AM on January 30, 2019 [14 favorites]
I've worked in startups or tech shops where this framework didn't exist and postmortem and retros would degenerate into finger pointing exercises that destroyed trust and added toxicity to politics. I don't think that blameless postmortems are perfect but the difference that they bring to process improvements illustrate the value of proper framing of the discussion.
posted by bl1nk at 9:57 AM on January 30, 2019 [14 favorites]
Along the lines of what witchen and ropeladder said--I have a couple of "mistakes you've made and what you learned from them" anecdotes that I can tell in interviews, and they are true, and I definitely learned something from them. But they're bullshit in that I could easily think of other, much worse mistakes that I had to do a lot more personal growing to get over, but I wouldn't want to share with coworkers and no way in fuck would I share them with interviewers.
These real failures have been things like "flaking on major job responsibilities because I couldn't handle the stress of telling different supervisors what I could and could not accomplish, and so just hoped the problem would go away, causing significant failure in service that the client found out about" or "developing a lax attitude and doing a generally shitty job until I got fired" or "wasting large amounts of time at work because I wasn't very assertive about looking for new projects and nobody was bringing them to me so I just messed around for hours on end for weeks rather than developing my professional abilities." I have learned from those failures, but in what kind of utopian workplace can someone admit those things without worrying about being taken less seriously as a person?
posted by skewed at 9:59 AM on January 30, 2019 [12 favorites]
These real failures have been things like "flaking on major job responsibilities because I couldn't handle the stress of telling different supervisors what I could and could not accomplish, and so just hoped the problem would go away, causing significant failure in service that the client found out about" or "developing a lax attitude and doing a generally shitty job until I got fired" or "wasting large amounts of time at work because I wasn't very assertive about looking for new projects and nobody was bringing them to me so I just messed around for hours on end for weeks rather than developing my professional abilities." I have learned from those failures, but in what kind of utopian workplace can someone admit those things without worrying about being taken less seriously as a person?
posted by skewed at 9:59 AM on January 30, 2019 [12 favorites]
This is a huge part of why I love the Agile Methodology (recent posts about it sounding cult-ish acknowledged) when it comes to software development. Truly adopting the methodology involves embracing the idea of "failing fast (and often)" - because failures are typically your best learning opportunities.
Maybe it will turn out to be a failure in it's own right, but I am DESPERATELY committed to applying this to my parenting style with our kid. I grew up with parents who could never be wrong about anything, and I had this moment of revelation in my late teens (OF ALL THINGS) that just by the nature of reality of the universe, they were not in fact perfect. So much of honoring my kid for the wonderful human that he is of his own essence - is going to be in demonstrating to him where and when I do fail, and owning that, and apologizing for it, and learning and growing from it. I hope I can do this well for him.
posted by allkindsoftime at 10:01 AM on January 30, 2019 [5 favorites]
Maybe it will turn out to be a failure in it's own right, but I am DESPERATELY committed to applying this to my parenting style with our kid. I grew up with parents who could never be wrong about anything, and I had this moment of revelation in my late teens (OF ALL THINGS) that just by the nature of reality of the universe, they were not in fact perfect. So much of honoring my kid for the wonderful human that he is of his own essence - is going to be in demonstrating to him where and when I do fail, and owning that, and apologizing for it, and learning and growing from it. I hope I can do this well for him.
posted by allkindsoftime at 10:01 AM on January 30, 2019 [5 favorites]
One of my goals as a manager in every job I've had is to create an environment and process where we can discuss why a project failed, what we learn from the failure and how to do it better next time without making it a blame exercise. You've got to be able to discuss what went wrong without it turning into a matter of who screwed up (that's for one-to-one discussions). In turn I can then go to my superiors and admit the failure and discuss what needs to change.
Of course, I'm lucky in that I'm in an area where success or failure isn't a matter of life or death, but even so work would be impossible if we couldn't honestly discuss failure. It doesn't mean being indifferent to failure: it still stings, and you've got to commit to the learning even if it challenges longstanding habits or ideas.
posted by YoungStencil at 10:37 AM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]
Of course, I'm lucky in that I'm in an area where success or failure isn't a matter of life or death, but even so work would be impossible if we couldn't honestly discuss failure. It doesn't mean being indifferent to failure: it still stings, and you've got to commit to the learning even if it challenges longstanding habits or ideas.
posted by YoungStencil at 10:37 AM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]
I used to hate the interview questions that asked about my mistakes or failures. I thought my best chance to survive the interview was to find the smallest, least significant tidbit of non success to share.
After years of experience failing and making mistakes on the job (learning way more from the failures than successes), and untold hours of self medication with improvised theatre, these questions are much more fun. Everyone makes mistakes, they just want to know what you do with yours. I now see these as a great opportunity for building rapport — because everyone makes mistakes.
posted by thedward at 11:15 AM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]
After years of experience failing and making mistakes on the job (learning way more from the failures than successes), and untold hours of self medication with improvised theatre, these questions are much more fun. Everyone makes mistakes, they just want to know what you do with yours. I now see these as a great opportunity for building rapport — because everyone makes mistakes.
posted by thedward at 11:15 AM on January 30, 2019 [1 favorite]
YoungStencil, can you elaborate a bit on what it looks like when a project fails? For example, is it a new product that doesn't sell, or is it a building collapse? Or something else entirely?
not youngstencil but:
(Software)
-- ProjectA was initially scoped (to take a month / cost $$) to complete, but is (now on Month 3 / costs $$$$) for reasons ...
-- ProjectL was supposed to be released on Friday but due to a number of issues in the production environment that couldn't be simulated in development or QA, the release failed or had to be rolled back for reasons ...
-- ProjectP was was supposed to solve ProblemP, and did solve ProblemP, but now created ProblemQ, ProblemR, and ProblemS for reasons ...
(Process)
-- We went on an intense effort to hire or train new employees to staff a new function or team and now six months later, that team or those new hires are struggling for reasons ...
-- We've been dealing with problems with the way these # teams have been collaborating with each other and reorganized the teams to make them work better together and it worked in some ways, but also created new problems for reasons ...
-- Our customers have been unhappy because we've been doing this stupid thing. We stopped doing the stupid thing but it's apparent that this stupid things wasn't actually what they were mad about.
-- We've been doing this Important Thing (ie. security, privacy, compliance, etc.) that makes us a little inconvenient for our customers but they put up with it because our service is valuable to them. But ...
> ... we reduced the amount of care we put on the Important Thing and it blew up in our faces
> ... our blind devotion to the Important Thing has outweighed the value of our service
just some examples from over the years.
posted by bl1nk at 11:18 AM on January 30, 2019
also my personal favorite twist on the "tell me about your mistakes" is asking, "tell me about the worst promise that you ever gave?"
Because at least it implies good faith on the part of the interviewee in whatever their intentions were in making that promise and sets themselves up to talk about it from an initially optimistic point of view before it all goes inexorably to hell.
posted by bl1nk at 11:21 AM on January 30, 2019 [4 favorites]
Because at least it implies good faith on the part of the interviewee in whatever their intentions were in making that promise and sets themselves up to talk about it from an initially optimistic point of view before it all goes inexorably to hell.
posted by bl1nk at 11:21 AM on January 30, 2019 [4 favorites]
In re: blameless postmortems and related collaborative, positive approaches to handling accidents and losses: they're amazing if everybody thinks what happened was a loss that needs prevented in the future. This includes a ton of operational problems, outages, and so on that all involved were doing their best to avoid. Notable counter-examples include sexual harassment and bullying: the perpetrators are unlikely to feel that a loss has occurred.
posted by bagel at 11:25 AM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
posted by bagel at 11:25 AM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
That sort of thing would categorically not fall under the scope of a blameless post-mortem and would be handled by personnel managers/HR, not engineering teams.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:35 AM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]
posted by tobascodagama at 11:35 AM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]
I've been given to understand that responsible jobs with dangerous failures don't just analyze failures, they learn to analyze near failures in order to improve the system before variability turns a near-failure into an actual failure.
posted by clew at 12:27 PM on January 30, 2019 [4 favorites]
comp.risks
was my introduction to how many near-disasters the world was made of -- oh hey, web interface to the Risks Digest.posted by clew at 12:27 PM on January 30, 2019 [4 favorites]
Reading about people who never admit mistakes... yikes. I realized a few years ago that my success at a large nonprofit was because I would accept responsibility for mistakes and fix them right away (whether or not they were truly my fault, a team effort, etc.) and be proactive with a solution. I saw so many people get thrown under the bus and just... get ground to shreds... trying to avoid it. I wonder if I was very lucky, of if I was tapping into something that people really wanted to see but didn't feel like they could do it. I was unhappy internally and kind of wanted to get fired/see what happened sometimes but it seemed like I could only go upward.
Not like I was constantly failing, but things were always going wrong when an organization had shed 200+ years of executive experience in a year or two. It was a crazy time. So many things I barely held it all together when we were near failure / things were actively breaking.
I was probably just lucky though.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 12:39 PM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
Not like I was constantly failing, but things were always going wrong when an organization had shed 200+ years of executive experience in a year or two. It was a crazy time. So many things I barely held it all together when we were near failure / things were actively breaking.
I was probably just lucky though.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 12:39 PM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
In my opinion, Agile uses the term 'failure' very loosely, so I don't really buy into that part of it being applicable to everyday life. Finding bugs is part of the job, but a crappy coder who can't meet deadlines eventually gets fired. System outages are part of the job - the sys admin who ok'd changes that he or she shouldn't have gets fired. Bad financiers who greenlight unproductive projects get fired. Agile 'fail fast' supports minor mistakes within a very narrow scope, not actual failure.
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:57 PM on January 30, 2019
posted by The_Vegetables at 12:57 PM on January 30, 2019
It's weird seeing articles like this and then getting performance indicators at work that literally do not allow for the possibility of failure, and also knowing people in retail/grocery/other customer service jobs where anything less than 100%! 110%!!! is considered failure and unacceptable. I really do wish we could consider failure, that would be rad. I admit my own experiences in skilled but unglamorous gigs indicate that if you are a mediocre business/mgmt dude it is ok to fail but everyone else is on their own.
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 1:48 PM on January 30, 2019 [5 favorites]
posted by nixon's meatloaf at 1:48 PM on January 30, 2019 [5 favorites]
also knowing people in retail/grocery/other customer service jobs where anything less than 100%! 110%!!! is considered failure and unacceptable
Yes, kind of glaring in the light of 10 point external customer satisfaction surveys where anything less than a 10 is unacceptable. My work supports Agile, but we have the same 10 point internal rating scale where only 9-10 are acceptable answers.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:52 PM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]
Yes, kind of glaring in the light of 10 point external customer satisfaction surveys where anything less than a 10 is unacceptable. My work supports Agile, but we have the same 10 point internal rating scale where only 9-10 are acceptable answers.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:52 PM on January 30, 2019 [3 favorites]
System outages are part of the job - the sys admin who ok'd changes that he or she shouldn't have gets fired.Hey do we remember that entry level developer who deleted a production database on their first day at the job? (previously, if you didn't.) Requoting first comment from that FP:
"If your newest hire can accidentally kill prod on their first day, that's not the hire's fault, that's the company's."
Should people get fired because they have a record of bad performance? yes. Should they take responsibility for taking feedback about their performance and improving on it? absolutely. Should one catastrophic mistake mean that you are a personal failure and deserve the black mark of being fired? Maybe, but often no?
For teams, it's easy to just use blame to find a useful scapegoat for a systems problem and thereby not actually improve systemic issues that exist. So while there are indeed people that suck and deserve to be fired and considered failures, I think, too often, it's an easy way out for teams to ignore their own baggage.
It also sounds like we're beanplating the difference between mistake, failure, and contributing to a problem. A few people have brought up examples of personal/career failures here, and we also talk about frameworks about discussing mistakes.
I think that something that's getting missed and is hinted at in part of the article is that part of what contributes to people reaching a career threatening level of failure is a reluctance to admit to or be aware of mistakes, and thereby stunt their own growth. Shame is a powerful force for self-denial, as are narcissism and other forms of psychology that frame flaws or mistakes as taboo subjects. I wanted to raise patterns like blameless postmortem or 'fail fast, fail often' as a way of highlight TFA's main point, that being able to talk about mistakes in a productive way is crucial for growth for people and for groups.
posted by bl1nk at 3:04 PM on January 30, 2019 [5 favorites]
Jesus fucking Christ.
Yeah
What did we learn, Palmer?
I don't know sir.
I don't fucking know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
Yes sir.
I'm fucked if I know what we did.
Yes sir, it's hard to say.
Jesus fucking Christ.
---
(but seriously)
In my teacher training circles we are very big on Kolb's Reflective Cycle, so there is this culture of expectations for noticing and describing classroom (or other) behaviors and events to refine, develop, improve. Iterative development, trial and error, learning by doing... but really to me this is just "learning".
We try to avoid "failure" "mistake" and the like when describing - it carries a value judgment and has negative connotations in the wider world that we want to avoid, and we want to make the system as frictionless for trainees to enter as possible.
But I hate these questions and suck at them in interviews. I make "mistakes" all the time, this is a commonplace thing, everybody does. But you, Ms. Job Interviewer, are not a part of my teaching culture and are not a member of my learning community. The power and information imbalance in this high stakes conversation is massive. You are not here to help me learn but to judge and assess my responses. So you'll understand why I am a bit reticent.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:38 PM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
Yeah
What did we learn, Palmer?
I don't know sir.
I don't fucking know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
Yes sir.
I'm fucked if I know what we did.
Yes sir, it's hard to say.
Jesus fucking Christ.
---
(but seriously)
In my teacher training circles we are very big on Kolb's Reflective Cycle, so there is this culture of expectations for noticing and describing classroom (or other) behaviors and events to refine, develop, improve. Iterative development, trial and error, learning by doing... but really to me this is just "learning".
We try to avoid "failure" "mistake" and the like when describing - it carries a value judgment and has negative connotations in the wider world that we want to avoid, and we want to make the system as frictionless for trainees to enter as possible.
But I hate these questions and suck at them in interviews. I make "mistakes" all the time, this is a commonplace thing, everybody does. But you, Ms. Job Interviewer, are not a part of my teaching culture and are not a member of my learning community. The power and information imbalance in this high stakes conversation is massive. You are not here to help me learn but to judge and assess my responses. So you'll understand why I am a bit reticent.
posted by Meatbomb at 5:38 PM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
But what does failure look like for a receptionist? Taking too long to get a patient checked in? Something very minor that they'd forget about within a day.
What does failure look like for a childcare worker, or the hospital employees in TFA? [ . . . ]
A receptionist has modes of failure like letting the wrong person through, screwing up an appointment, leaving the angry important customer on hold too long, not recognizing an emergency that *should* have had an exception made, etc.
Given the statistics on hospital mistakes and complexity of the job I guarantee you any hospital worker with any length of experience and responsibility has had failures. The one you pick to discuss would presumably be one someone else was able to correct before it caused harm (which is hopefully all of them.)
posted by mark k at 8:48 PM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
What does failure look like for a childcare worker, or the hospital employees in TFA? [ . . . ]
A receptionist has modes of failure like letting the wrong person through, screwing up an appointment, leaving the angry important customer on hold too long, not recognizing an emergency that *should* have had an exception made, etc.
Given the statistics on hospital mistakes and complexity of the job I guarantee you any hospital worker with any length of experience and responsibility has had failures. The one you pick to discuss would presumably be one someone else was able to correct before it caused harm (which is hopefully all of them.)
posted by mark k at 8:48 PM on January 30, 2019 [2 favorites]
I think the concept of asking questions and being open about failures is really critical here. We do this at my work, which has a lot of new/first-time workers. As with a lot of things, the power relationship is important. We create an atmosphere where we help them recover from failure first before we ask them to take on just straight out talking about failure.
What that looks like is this: Hey staff person, I was looking at this report and I noticed that this was done wrong. [I am not giving them any room to pretend this was business as usual.] Can you tell me what happened? Then when they say, including both reasons, which I identify "okay, that's an important reason to understand, let's brainstorm for next time" or "hmmm, do you think that's an actual reason or was it a few minutes of inattention to detail?" Then we talk about how to both fix the issue, but also prevent it. Like "did you take your break? How do you refocus before you go through XYZ process?" "how can you warm up before you give a class so you don't have an awkward first 10 minutes?"
THEN as management we make sure that we recognize both when they're doing it right, and also any time they save us the trouble of discovering the failure and just coming and saying they made a mistake. If all you do is enter a room and require people to admit their failures without them knowing what will happen next, it's going to be really hard on people. That's where the job interview question requires a kind of measured approach.
Note that most of our mistakes are not high-stakes outside of our organization. But internally, they are.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:40 AM on January 31, 2019 [2 favorites]
What that looks like is this: Hey staff person, I was looking at this report and I noticed that this was done wrong. [I am not giving them any room to pretend this was business as usual.] Can you tell me what happened? Then when they say, including both reasons, which I identify "okay, that's an important reason to understand, let's brainstorm for next time" or "hmmm, do you think that's an actual reason or was it a few minutes of inattention to detail?" Then we talk about how to both fix the issue, but also prevent it. Like "did you take your break? How do you refocus before you go through XYZ process?" "how can you warm up before you give a class so you don't have an awkward first 10 minutes?"
THEN as management we make sure that we recognize both when they're doing it right, and also any time they save us the trouble of discovering the failure and just coming and saying they made a mistake. If all you do is enter a room and require people to admit their failures without them knowing what will happen next, it's going to be really hard on people. That's where the job interview question requires a kind of measured approach.
Note that most of our mistakes are not high-stakes outside of our organization. But internally, they are.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:40 AM on January 31, 2019 [2 favorites]
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“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.”
I’ve been interviewing people for something like 15 years now, 10 of which have been as a hiring manager. There have been plenty of people who can’t think of a mistake they have made that I’ve said we shouldn’t hire... that’s typically not the only reason, but it’s one of the most noteworthy. Literally every single one of them ended up being either very short term or a chronic problem.
The only people who have never made a mistake are those who have been propped up enough that they are never in a position where they’d have to risk doing so.
As a culture, we think of mistakes as this thing that needs to be swept under the rug, that should never be shown. It is such a huge part of learning, and just being human in general.
I’ve found the whole culture of hiding mistakes particularly insidious in the creative world. When you see a successful and famous creative, be it a musician, an artist, a writer, whatever - you almost always experience them through the lens of their success. You don’t see the 20 arrhythmic or atonal takes that went into recording a particularly tricky part of a song, you don’t see the bulk of an artists work that the portfolio was carefully curated from, you don’t see pre-edited and rejected writings.... we experience them through their best works. If you are an aspiring creative, this can be toxic - its easy to think you simply don’t have something in you when in reality you are experiencing the same thing that many who you may hold in high regard not only experienced in their past, but likely still experience.
posted by MysticMCJ at 8:34 AM on January 30, 2019 [36 favorites]