From HBR - how to recover from being fired

This post from John Beeson on the HBR Blog Network has some good advice on bouncing back from losing your job:

You've just received word that you've been fired. Or perhaps the company has gone through a re-structuring and eliminated your job — and you've been told that none of the managers you've worked with over the years have a position for you on their team. This comes as a shock to your system, especially if you've enjoyed a record of success up to this point in your career. While there are some practical things to attend to — negotiating your severance, signing up references, and agreeing with the company on a storyline about the reason for your exit — your most important action item is managing your own attitude to the situation....

As you dust yourself off, think through those parts of the situation you need to own. In a highly emotional state, it's too easy for you to curse the darkness: "I had a bad boss." "The place was rife with organizational politics." "My colleagues were non-cooperative and had it in for me." There may be some truth to this, but you also need to ask yourself, "What do I need to accept about the experience to avoid making the same mistakes so I can succeed in the future?"

Losing your job is a very particular type of failure. It's likely the most emotionally painful event of your career. Analyzing your role in the situation is not natural; you will want instead to lash out and place blame on others (as Beeson writes, this may very well be the case), or to fall into a funk of despair. But to bounce back, better to "own" the outcome and figure out what lessons you can take into the rest of your career.

No Mulligans

I played golf with my brother-in-law a few years ago. He hadn’t played much and was struggling. But no matter where his drive went, or where he found his ball, he would not take a mulligan or improve his lie. “Go ahead and move the ball,” I told him. “Why suffer?”

“No thanks,” was his reply. And he hacked the ball back into the fairway.
That round made a big impression on me. For one thing, I was a poor-to-fair golfer and I’d take mulligans from time to time, or take a favorable drop, or the like. But what my brother-in-law taught me that day was that I would never know precisely how well I was doing at golf if I didn’t follow the rules.

And if I didn’t know how well I was doing, it would be hard to improve. I had to confront the brutal facts (as stated in “Good to Great”) before I could move forward.

I tried to take that lesson into my business life as well. How were things going, really? Was I using excuses to mask weaknesses I myself needed to address?

In short, to be great at business you can’t take mulligans. You’ve got to face reality and try to improve.
It was a very valuable day on the golf course. After I cut down on the mulligans and played the ball where it lay, my scores, predictably, got worse. Over time they’ve come down. And, best of all, they’re real.

(Photo: “Tee Time 3″ from Garrison Photography via stock.xchng–note: NOT my brother-in-law)

Physics professor learns the standard way of teaching didn't work - "My teaching caused my students to fail!"

Garr Reynolds, on his Presentation Zen blog, discusses Harvard physics professor Eric Mazur's evolution from straight-up college lecturer to accomplished teacher and authority on student peer learning. Garr's post goes into many facets of Mazur's story, but I want to focus here on just one part - Mazur's taking accountability for his students' failure to learn:

"I thought I was a good teacher until I discovered my students were just memorizing information rather than learning to understand the material," says Mazur. "Who was to blame? The students? The material?" In this presentation below from 2009 entitled "Confessions of a Converted Lecturer," Mazur explains how he came to the conclusion that "It was my teaching that caused students to fail!" If you have the time I recommend that you watch the entire presentation(over one hour in length). However, there is a rough edit of the same presentation that is still fairly good at getting Mazur's key points across in just 18 minutes.Watch the abridged version here on Youtube.



Mazur's sense of agency is notable, especially in education, where failures are easily blamed on students, parents or adminstrators, but the single area that can make all the difference is the approach and methods of a skilled, committed teacher.

Mistakes anchor you to the past until you own them"

A neat post from Dan Rockwell on Leadership Freak. Here's the money quote, for me:

Futures emerge after mistakes are owned, not until. Mistakes anchor life in the past until you say, “I screwed up.”

See more on owning mistakes here.

Balanced self-awareness is essential to success

Camille Sweeney and Josh Gosfield wrote in the New York Times about the importance of self-awareness in achieving success ("Secret Ingredient for Success"). Sweeney and Gosfield are the authors of "The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well." In the article, they tell the story of renowned chef David Chang, who struggled after starting Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York City:

Mr. Chang could have blamed someone else for his troubles, or worked harder (though available evidence suggests that might not have been possible) or he could have made minor tweaks to the menu. Instead he looked inward and subjected himself to brutal self-assessment.

Was the humble noodle bar of his dreams economically viable? Sure, a traditional noodle dish had its charm but wouldn't work as the mainstay of a restaurant if he hoped to pay his bills.

Mr. Chang changed course. Rather than worry about what a noodle bar should serve, he and his cooks stalked the produce at the greenmarket for inspiration. Then they went back to the kitchen and cooked as if it was their last meal, crowding the menu with wild combinations of dishes they'd want to eat - tripe and sweetbreads, headcheese and flavor-packed culinary mashups like a Korean-style burrito. What happened next Mr. Chang still considers "kind of ridiculous" - the crowds came, rave reviews piled up, awards followed and unimaginable opportunities presented themselves.

During the 1970s, Chris Argyris, a business theorist at Harvard Business School (and now, at 89, a professor emeritus) began to research what happens to organizations and people, like Mr. Chang, when they find obstacles in their paths.

Professor Argyris called the most common response single loop learning - an insular mental process in which we consider possible external or technical reasons for obstacles.

Less common but vastly more effective is the cognitive approach that Professor Argyris called double-loop learning. In this mode we - like Mr. Chang - question every aspect of our approach, including our methodology, biases and deeply held assumptions. This more psychologically nuanced self-examination requires that we honestly challenge our beliefs and summon the courage to act on that information, which may lead to fresh ways of thinking about our lives and our goals.

We've written about this prescription over and over again on this site. Self-awareness is a key to success - and it involves scrutinizing our strengths, weaknesses, and deepest assumptions about the world. It requires viewing ourselves at a slight remove, so we can diagnose the things we must do to be successful.

It involves "facing actual circumstances," instead of what we wish would happen, as Justin Menkes described in "Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others."

It involves a balanced look at our successes and failures - unlike Lafley & Martin.

It may even benefit from Paul Schoemaker's "deliberate mistake" - an action taken counter to your own sense of what will work.

You cannot control external factors. As the Buddhists say, you can only control what you do and how you react to things that happen. By cultivating self-awareness (including by tracking and evaluating the things that don't go to plan)

A notable apology from the editor of The Sun magazine

What follows is an email from Sy Safransky, editor of The Sun, a US political magazine, to subscribers. There are some notable elements in this apology related to recovering from a mistake (Chapter 1 in the Mistake Bank book), which I will enumerate after the email. [The full interview referred to in the email is here.]

The Sun owes an apology to David Krieger, Leslee Goodman, and our readers. In our January 2013 issue we published an interview by Goodman titled “Indefensible: David Krieger on the Continuing Threat of Nuclear Weapons.” In it, Krieger is quoted as saying that the path to global security “can only be through unilateral nuclear disarmament.” He never said that. One of our editors made the error of inserting the word unilateral into Krieger’s statement. In foreign-policy circles, suggesting that one country abolish its nuclear arsenal while others maintain theirs is widely considered unrealistic and counterproductive. We thus misrepresented a central aspect of Krieger’s views. The mistake didn’t get past Krieger, however. When we sent him the interview for a final review, he asked that we replace the word unilateral, which he’d never used, with total. We assured Krieger we would make that change. Then, regrettably, we neglected to do so. I couldn’t be more chagrined at the careless way this was handled. In an effort to make amends, we’ve posted the full text of the corrected interview on our website. We are sending a reprinted version of the interview to hundreds of nuclear-disarmament activists, national-security experts, and others with whom Krieger has worked over the years. We’ll also provide copies for Krieger to distribute at upcoming conferences and for any Sun reader who requests one. (Please write to Molly Herboth at The Sun, 107 North Roberson Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516 or e-mail molly@thesunmagazine.org with your mailing address.) Accuracy matters to us. This is why each issue of the magazine is copy-edited, proofread, and fact-checked by multiple editors and proofreaders, and then scrutinized a final time before it goes to print. In this instance, the error got past all of us. (For the record, our veteran proofreader wasn’t available to work on this issue.) As The Sun’s editor and publisher, I bear ultimate responsibility for every word that appears in the magazine. I know what “unilateral nuclear disarmament” means but read right past it. I deeply regret my mistake. Krieger was gracious and forgiving with us. I invited him to clarify his position for our readers, and he sent us the statement that appears below. Sy Safransky Editor and publisher Raising awareness of the continuing threat of nuclear weapons has been my primary focus for three decades as cofounder and president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Neither I nor the foundation has ever called for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Thus, I was shocked to see myself quoted in The Sun as saying just that. What I said was “The path to security can only be through totalnuclear disarmament.” Why does it matter? Because to call for unilateral nuclear disarmament is to ask that one nation eliminate its arsenal, leaving itself vulnerable to other countries’ nuclear weapons. This is neither realistic nor politically feasible. It is also not sufficient. I do not ask any country to take such a risk. What I ask is for the countries of the world — particularly the nine that now have nuclear weapons — to engage in negotiations with the goal of total nuclear disarmament. I believe that the U.S. can lead the way, using its influence to bring other nations to the negotiating table, where together they might arrange for the phased, verifiable, and irreversible elimination of all nuclear weapons. It is unlikely that the U.S. will initiate such negotiations, however, unless its citizenry demands it. We must awaken to the danger and organize to abolish nuclear weapons as though our very lives depend upon it — because they do. There are still some nineteen thousand nuclear weapons in the world, and the use of even a small number of them would have catastrophic consequences. Atmospheric scientists tell us that just one hundred Hiroshima-sized nuclear detonations in a war between India and Pakistan, for example, could lead to a global famine, causing hundreds of millions of deaths. Unilateral nuclear disarmament is not what we seek at the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. What we seek is a rational solution, and when it comes to nuclear weapons, the only rational number is zero. That means total nuclear disarmament. It is one of the overarching issues of our time, and your voice can make a difference. If you would like to play a role in securing a future free from the threat of nuclear annihilation, join us online at www.wagingpeace.org. David Krieger Click here to opt out of receiving e-mails or to manage your e-mail settings. Copyright © 2013, The Sun Publishing Company, Inc. 107 North Roberson Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516 Privacy Policy

Here's what is really good about Safransky's apology:

1. Timely. The January 2013 issue is still current. He didn't wait till time had passed, and  
2. Public & accessible. It was sent to every subscriber, rather than being buried on a page deep in the print magazine or website.
3. Shows a sense of agency. "I deeply regret my mistake." Not the editor's mistake (inserting a word into the quote), or the proofreader's mistake, or anyone else's. The buck stops with Safransky, and he takes responsibility.
4. Authentic & personal. There are no weasel words or sliding around the truth. There's just a touch of the passive voice - "I couldn't be more chagrined at the careless way this was handled" - but, after all, apologies are hard.  [Here's a less successful one.]
5. Fair & generous. Safransky includes Krieger's critical note right in the email, allowing him to correct the record and provide his own context.

I hope many leaders read this apology and absorb its lessons. They may be in a position to do this themselves one day.

[Thanks to Amy for sharing this.]

How to make use of a failure

There's a nice post on LinkedIn by Maria Gottschalk titled "Moving Through Failure." Gottschalk's advice is similar to that of Dean Shepherd in "Lemons to Lemonade" and seen in many other posts on this site. Gottschalk usefully urges us, when reflecting on failure, to ignore external factors and focus on the things we did that contributed to the failure, and how we can act differently in the future to prevent a similar failure. And she shares her own failure story:

At one time, I worked as an internal researcher for a large organization. I was responsible for a key customer research project. After reviewing the yearly numbers, I became extremely alarmed that if strategy wasn't altered, we were bound to lose customers. I reported this information to leadership - and they were visibly shaken - but they did not shift strategy. They felt confident that they had things under control. I suspected that they didn't fully realize the levity of the situation, and unfortunatley as the year progressed, sizable customer losses followed. Ultimately, I hadn't convinced them to take action. The onus was on me. A clear failure on my part - as it was my primary role to counsel them.

I do realize that I was not in control of their chosen course of action. However, moving forward, I always make one last effort to change opinions, by meeting separately with individual stakeholders. Only, at that point am I fully satisfied that I have done my part - my "homage" to the original failure.

Despite the fact that others were truly accountable for the decision, Gottschalk showed a sense of agency by scrutinizing her role and making a concrete decision to do more the next time she was faced with a similar situation.

Paul Downs stops blaming the economy for his sales downturn

Paul Downs, writing in the New York Times You're The Boss blog, published a series of posts on dealing with a downturn in orders this year. The final post discussed Downs's coming to terms with his responsibility to solve the problem and not blame outside forces. This is the "sense of agency" and it comes up again and again in learning from mistakes (it's a key focus in Chapter 1 of the Mistake Bank book).

Over the last few years, I have made a conscious effort to find ways to get advice from other business owners. Writing this blog was the first thing I did, and I have found the feedback from commenters to be valuable. This year, in an effort to find a more focused set of advisers, I joined a Vistage business group. We meet once a month, and a portion of each meeting is devoted to analysis of business issues that each member presents. When a member of the group presents a problem, the other owners listen, ask questions and then suggest solutions.

Through the spring, I kept the group updated as my sales collapsed, and in May (as I explained in Thursday’s post), I told everyone that I felt like a victim of a bad economy. The thing was, nobody else in the business group was having such a hard time. Many of them felt the economy could be better but that conditions were still favorable. I seemed to be the only one who was suffering and the only one who thought that the problem was out of my control. One of the members told me bluntly: “I don’t want to hear any more about the Euro or health care or whatever excuses you come up with. This is YOUR problem, and YOU have to solve it.”

Excellent advice. Complaining hadn’t helped, upping my ad budget hadn’t worked, so I had to keep trying things until we either recovered or went under. But if it wasn’t an outside problem, then what could it be? It had to be something about my marketing, and that meant the problem was in AdWords. Once I decided the problem had to be there, I started looking at the data again to try to find a solution. But this time I approached my analysis with the conviction that the problem was something I had done — not something that was beyond my control.

Read Downs's post to learn what happened.

Decathlon champion discusses failure in business

From the New York Times obituary of 1956 Olympic decathlon champion Milt Campbell, who died this past Friday. This quote establishes Campbell's sense of agency that likely fueled his athletic drive as well:

[Campbell] later became a motivational speaker, with failure in business as his own motivation. “When I lost all my money in the meat-trucking business in 1976,” he told The Times in 1980, “I realized that I understood about success and failure. I realized that it had nothing to do with anyone else, only me.”

Peyton Manning going to Denver: "I have to go from now and make it the right decision"

In an interview on NFL Network with Peyton Manning, after his decision to sign with the Denver Broncos after 14 years with the Indianapolis Colts, said this:

This decision was hard.... I had to pick one [team]. I wanted to go to all of 'em at one point. But, like the other decisions I made in the past, I decided to make it and not look back. And to go from now and make it the right decision. I have to go to work to make it the right decision.

Showing a true sense of agency. If things don't work out in Denver, Manning won't blame anyone else. It's more likely, however, that he is successful - because he will work to make it so. He has taken ownership of the decision and the outcome.

Why journal your mistakes?

I am reading a Harvard Business School working paper, entitled "Learning From My Success and From Others' Failure: Evidence from Minimally-Invasive Cardiac Surgery." The key finding is right there in the title. We learn better from others' mistakes than from our own. This is largely due to the "self-attribution bias" that behavioral economists like Daniel Kahneman discovered - in our limited perspective, we ascribe our successes to our abilities and efforts, while we blame failures on external circumstances. 

This means we by nature carry a large blind spot around with us--it's hard, and unnatural, to reflect on and scrutinize our own actions to look for areas of improvement. In fact, it can make us feel bad about ourselves - not a good situation for learning, no?

Here's where journaling comes in. When something goes awry, all you need to do is write it down. Classify it as a Mistake and move on. Then, weeks later, after the intensity and emotions of the moment have dissipated, you look back at it, think about it. What happened? Think about your role - recognize that mistakes and failures are owned by groups, but self-improvement is your task alone. (This is having a sense of agency.) What could you have done differently that could have affected the outcome? Next time your face a similar circumstance, how will you handle it?

Documenting and reflecting on mistakes isn't easy. It's a discipline that needs to be learned. But think about this: according to the Harvard paper, most people don't learn well from their own mistakes. If you can be one of the few that do, it puts you at a tremendous advantage. That advantage will create opportunities, and allow you to capitalize on them.

If you'd like to try a free journaling app that was created to aid in this process, sign up here.

From "Better Under Pressure," Jeremy's Story: Lacking a sense of agency

Another great story from Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others. This one is about "Jeremy," a high potential executive who was struggling in a stretch role. Menkes uses the term "sense of agency" to describe taking personal accountability and responsibility for issues. He defines it in the book this way:

Sense of agency...refers to the degree to which people attribute their circumstances and the outcomes they experience to being within their own control.

This would be the opposite approach of the villain Tom Chaney (previously discussed in this post) in "True Grit," whose catchphrase is, "Everything is against me."

Here's Jeremy's story:

Jeremy was being groomed for possible promotion to the CEO role. His past success in commercializing products and executing their successful launch had dramatically raised his profile in the company. He had come to be seen as a possible successor to the CEO, and to further stretch him, the company placed him in charge of one of its underperforming divisions. When I met Jeremy, he had been in this new role for two years, and for the first time in his career, he was struggling to delivery. Many around the company had begun to question whether Jeremy had been promoted over his head, and he was feeling tremendous mounting pressure to show dramatic improvements in the division soon or be replaced.

.... An in-depth look at his track record, feedback from colleagues, and direct interviews with Jeremy himself revealed that his exceptional marketing talents and intense professional drive had led to an extraordinary level of success very early. But when he had been given a leadership position of dramatically increased scope, his tenure became marked with missteps. This is very normal, as leaders adjusting to a significant increase in responsibility invariably make many mistakes. Those who ultimately excel recognize and own these missteps quickly and use the experiences to grow into their positions of elevated authority and increased complexity. But for this learning curve to occur, it is absolutely crucial that they accept their role in these mistakes. If they have a low sense of agency, they cannot, and will fail.

As I got to know Jeremy, it became clear that the exceptional qualities that led to his raid ascent in the compnay were indeed impressive. He had a keen sense of market conditions and consumer needs and a knack for connecting the dots in a way that revealed dramatic new market opportunities. These high-profile successes earned him an expansive, well-deserved reputation in the compnay. But thus far, he had been thriving within divisions that already had well-established world-cleass operations in place. In Jeremy's new position, he was being asked for the first time to turn a failing team into a strong one. It was an essential test if he was going to be a serious candidate for CEO, and it was one that exposed Jeremy's Achilles heel. 

When I asked Jeremy why he had missed his units's earning targets every quarter for two years, he immediately deflected responsibility for this critical problem. "This place was a mess when I got here," he said. "I'm doing everything possible to get this thing turned around quickly, but the people here expect miracles. I need more time." Jeremy went on to say he felt he was being judged unfairly by colleagues, that people saw him as a threat and were just waiting for him to fail. "They need to help make me successful, not criticize." 

When pushed, Jeremy acknowledged that at least some of his colleagues seemed sincere in wanting him to be successful. But he still blamed his incompetent team for most of the problem. He fired some of those people, but then he found their replacements - people whom he had hired himself - "incompetent" as well.... 

Jeremy laid the blame for his division's poor performance on others - even those he himself had fired - showing a very low sense of agency, which is what I explained to him in our feedback session. Until he was able to take ownership of his situation and the central role he played in bringing it about, I told him, he was never going to gain from the critical learning opportunity that had been handed to him with this job. No one was expecting him to flawlessly turn around a situation that was indeed challenging, but Jeremy's problem was that he was showing no upward trajectory that could give his colleagues the confidence that he was learning from his mistakes and growing into the job.

pp. 91-93

Excerpted from "Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others" by Justin Menkes. (c) 2011 Esaress Holding, Limited.

Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer realizes how he enabled a conflict between subordinates

Another snippet from the new book "Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others" by Justin Menkes. In an interview, Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer discusses how focusing on his role in enabling a conflict between two subordinates, rather than ordering them to work it out themselves, helped them all get the problem solved.

Sharer's insistence throughout our conversation that his success was far from preordained reveals his acute awareness of actual circumstances. His openness to the very real possibilities that events could have unfolded unfavorably throughout his life is an essential part of his insistence of a clear-eyed view of his life choices. This kind of realism is at the heart of the adaptive capacity leaders need to have: to authentically believe in the value of self-improvement, leaders must also authentically embrace how their past imperfections had very real, and sometimes costly, consequences.

For example, Sharer described how two of his best people almost blew up over tension with each other, and how he was able to claim his own role in the issue. "I had assigned my two key guys to resolve a problem," he told me. "I just said,'Would you guys please figure this out?' They didn't have a shared reality, and it wasn't clear who was supposed to do what. Soon their differences of opinion were starting to cascade down. It was really tearing the company apart."

Once it finally dawned on him that he might have had a role in the conflict from the beginning, he asked himself honestly what part of it he owned, and then he set things right. "I came up with a list about that long" - he spread his arms wide - "of my part of the problem. And when I briefed them the next Monday, I said, 'Look, guys, before I tell you what's gone wrong and what we need to do, let me tell you what I haven't done.' That cleared the air, and then we found a way to fix things. In fact, we got stronger as a team because of going through this fire together."

pp. 71-72

Excerpted from "Better Under Pressure: How Great Leaders Bring Out the Best in Themselves and Others" by Justin Menkes. (c) 2011 Esaress Holding, Limited.

"The first thing I did was take full responsibility for my predicament"

Another business mistake story reported by Marcia Pledger of The Cleveland Plain Dealer. This story is from Tony Kleem, owner of Tony K's Bar & Grille in Berea, Ohio.

The Mistake: My biggest mistake was opening a restaurant without doing enough research or surrounding myself with experienced employees. I had owned a small bar for several years, but running a restaurant with 160 seats is a whole different world.
I knew I needed to get into the food business in order to survive. But I spent more time planning menus then I did learning about operations. It doesn't matter how good the food is if your service is off.

In the nine months it took to build, I was focusing more on construction, furniture, equipment and hiring. The problem was I should have selected a manager with significant experience, including a restaurant opening. Except for learning the computerized ordering system, I didn't even offer training.

Looking back 12 years ago, I just closed my eyes and went through the wall. I didn't know basics, like having a soft opening on a Monday to work out the kinks. I opened on a Friday, and everything that could go wrong went wrong. Saturday was worse.

I comped a lot of meals that first weekend. You don't go into business to give away food and drinks. I did both, just trying to get customers to give my business a second chance. In the restaurant business, it's hard to get over bad first impressions.

The Fix: The first thing I did was take full responsibility for my predicament. Then I vowed to succeed, by doing whatever I could within reason to please customers.

Customers have to know that they're valued, and it's up to managers and the owner to make sure employees know that's the top priority. Sometimes it just means acknowledging an issue, then working to rectify it.

Communication is key. People don't mind waiting when you explain what's going on. I tell the staff that the customer is always right, even when they're not. If it's a situation that they can't handle, call in a manager to deal with it the proper way.

Soon after I opened, I spent the first two months cleaning house, making sure we had the right people in all sorts of positions.

To me, Tony's acknowledgement is key. "Taking responsibility for his predicament" allowed him to quickly see and understand his mistake. Rather than panicking, or blaming others, he owns up and figures out how to solve the situation. It is painful, and expensive, but he does it.

Contrast this with Tom Chaney of "True Grit." Despite being an outlaw and a killer, Chaney is the weakest person in the entire movie. He always moans about his predicament. "Everything is against me," he says, over and over again. All I can say is, I'm glad he never tried to open a restaurant.