Thoughts on Workplace Failure – Cat Wilson
By Cat Wilson, Director of the Centre for Educational Enhancement and Development
I was recently asked to deliver a Pecha Kucha talk about ‘learning from failure’ and managed to fill up 20 slides with photos of my dog and my failure to train her to walk without throwing herself to the ground in a fit of stubbornness about the direction I wanted to go in.
I’m not sure that would make for a very interesting blog post, but it did get me thinking about some of my workplace failures and whether some of them were due to my stubbornness about the direction I wanted to go in. I have worked at the University for almost 20 years, very nearly all of my working life. I’ve held various roles, working in Staff Development, Student Development, Organisational Development and latterly Director of a Professional Services Unit. I have had failures in every role, some large some small. I don’t think you ever forget the first thing you professionally ‘fail’ at, though. I can still remember clearly the feeling when your stomach drops because you know you’ve made an error and caused something to go wrong. There’s no way to fix it, and you feel shame and disappointment at having messed up.
Now when I fail I’m not sure I have such a visceral reaction. Partly because I have more experience of work-place failure. Partly because I now manage a team of people and I have empathy when they fail (which helps me be kinder to myself when I fail), and partly because a failure isn’t really a failure at all, is it? It’s useful feedback. Feedback on what you did well and not so well in that set of circumstances. Feedback that the environment wasn’t quite right for what you were trying to do. Feedback that something needs to be adjusted before you try again.
When I was thinking about writing this blog I talked to my team about what they considered our team’s biggest failures. We hadn’t had that conversation before and I found out that it was really good to talk about this stuff! Failure can feel so personal that it’s freeing and positive to unpack it with other people. Does that mean I failed because I hadn’t instigated this discussion before? For every successful thing you do, does it mean that you also failed for not doing it earlier? I don’t know… perhaps success and failure are two sides of the same coin.
Anyway, one of my failures that surfaced in that discussion was when I wanted to expand our student development programme, called the Professional Skills Curriculum, out to recent graduates. We called the programme PSC Alumni, we invested time and resources creating the programme, building the infrastructure, costing it out. We designed and printed thousands of leaflets to let the graduating cohort know about it and placed one in every single graduand’s pack. I was really very pleased with myself. I thought this was a brilliant idea and was sure we’d get hundreds of graduates sharing my vision and rushing to sign up. Guess how many we got? I think it was three. I had fallen flat on my face. When I look back now, and reflect on my rush to proceed without doing some proper testing of the market, I think about my stubbornness to go in the direction I wanted to go in, like my headstrong terrier. I like to think that I’ve taken the feedback this failure gave me, and learned from it. That’s the great gift a failure gives us – they make us better decision makers, analysers, planners, leaders, listeners.