The Failure Tolerant Leader

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Failure and Tolerance

This next week will mark the culmination of my research efforts of this San Francisco summer. I will be presenting my summer findings to my mentor and a few of his associates. A venture capital company only stays open because it is able to achieve extraordinary returns on firms that they invest in and by having the talent to identify new potential acquisitions.

Over the past 8 weeks, I have collected information on a new potential industry sector for my company Third Rock Ventures to potentially invest in. I’ve scoured relevant literature, created extensive outlines to better organize these findings, and reported to my mentor with succinct industry details. During my time in the Bay area, I have encountered a number of failures, some more recent than others. After reading the article, I realized that I have utilized a few of the principles discussed by Farson and Keyes and have used them to learn from my mistakes.

One of my many blunders this summer was making assumptions as to what my mentor and the company were interested in. I made my outline and research geared toward a research area that was not well known and extremely expensive to pursue: stem cells. I was so excited about my research and the idea that I would be helping to move along stem cells as a new therapeutic that I did not really consider the cost implications and how much more research needed to be presented. When I made the formal suggestion to my mentor he could sense my enthusiasm and tried to explain the implications of my choice. We sat down together and analyzed the details of my plan. My mentor gave me an empathetic walkthrough of my plans and helped me learn the shortcomings of my proposal. His approach was educational and genuine, and I appreciated his frankness with me. It was an amazing learning experience where I was able to learn more about starting companies and how the industry operates on the whole. After our discussion, my mentor, another principal, and I sat down to create a plan of action that we could implement to later share with the rest of the company and the partners. I have been collaborating with both of them to create slides and analyze the industry to better make sense of what a potential investment could look like. I thought my protocol for creating slides was effective until I received some criticism from the principal I was working with. The principal, Neil Kumar, was a McKinsey associate for 5 years and had a polished methodology of creating slides and conducting analyses. I have worked with him to create the presentation that my mentor Craig will use to propose investing in a new company. These principles of analysis and collaboration have helped me worked through the failures where I failed to succeed independently. It allowed me to develop closer relationships and become a better expert on the industry overall. I am excited to find out what the week will go to unfold.

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Failure

Now, I am not someone who gets nervous or worried about speaking in front of people or giving presentations or anything of the sort (I’ll wait to say I’ve mastered public speaking until the DNC asks me to speak). But at the school I’m working at, we have a PA system like all schools do. Rob, my mentor and the principal, usually does all the announcements; when he’s not there, one of the other assistant principals does. And for some reason, the thought of doing the announcements was actually a little intimidating. It’s not like getting up and speaking to a group where you can make it like a presentation. Doing announcements is more like doing the news, where there is no personal interaction, so it’s all on the person speaking to not sound awkward or stumble. We had to make an announcement for something before lunch during summer school one day and so I went ahead and did it on my own. I messed up, and I’m sure I sounded ridiculous. But throughout the rest of the summer, I had to make the announcements several more times. While not a project like the article talked about, doing an announcement for school is a big deal. Especially if you mess up, kids might not take you as seriously and even make fun of you. And for someone who they don’t know yet, that is a terrible perception for them to have since it means you’ve lost control. So in that way, the stakes were very much real for me. But most fundamentally, I don’t even think this is a question of explicitly focusing on intelligent risks. The mindset the article argues for is just looking at the long-term. Of course you can look short-term and that’s where the measures of did you succeed at the project come from. A long-term mindset asks the question where is this going to take us, which incorporates that idea that risks are worth it as long as the aren’t from carelessness or sloppiness. This isn’t a shift on one specific question (or as Dustin and Judy like to say one paradigm shift), but is instead a change in mindset. It’s a change in attitude to a more people focused, long-term world view where people really can define how the game is played instead of just playing by what is there already.

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Failure Tolerance

Honestly, I had trouble identifying a situation where I used any of the skills mentioned to address failure. From reading the article, I didn’t really take away many specific approaches to addressing specific failures. Rather, what I learned from the article was approaches for how to cultivate a culture of innovation by leveraging failures.

One way I’ve used these techniques to address a specific failure was earlier this summer when I had a task to compile a spreadsheet. We needed to decide whether or not to send “landowner information packets” to a group of 24 landowners. I was tasked to compile a spreadsheet with landowner name, address, and prior interactions. Seeing this as a fairly simple task, I took the necessary information off of our database and put it the spreadsheet. Simple, right? After I sent it to Charlie, he looked over it, and made a lot of changes before sending it to the relevant coworker. All the changes dealt with how the prior interactions part of the spreadsheet was communicated. I was surprised about exactly why the changes were made, so I “got engaged” and talked with Charlie. He told me more about how the decision of whether or not to send an information packet was made, and he explained why the changes he made improved the ability of the spreadsheet to help someone make that decision.

After that minor failure, I kept the approach of “getting engaged” and started asking questions when I got similar tasks. I wanted to perform to the best of my ability. Not only did my asking of questions—although I had to be sure to not ask too many questions or bad questions—allow me to create better results, but also they showed my dedication and ability to think critically.

Later in the summer, when I started talking more in-depth with my coworkers about their work and tasks-at-hand, I asked some of the same questions I would ask Charlie when getting a new task. I found this very helpful into getting insight into how experienced professionals address a variety of topics, from menial tasks like writing an agenda for a weekly meeting, to more complicated tasks like cultivating a relationship with an important public policy person who can be hard to contact.

Another approach that has been successful to generating good ideas (but not necessarily dealing with failure) is collaborating to innovate. In a lot of meetings we have, we end up “barn-raising” to an effective degree. While I don’t see this “barn-raising” as a way to deal with specific failure incidents, it does do a great job at creating a failure-tolerant atmosphere where no one will be shot down for speaking out. 

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Neal: the Failure-Doesn’t-Exist Leader

The development of EasyBib Elementary (official product name still to be determined) has been my biggest and most trying project and is the best example of Farson and Keyes’ principals on addressing failure..  I sometimes worked in a team with Emily, the in-house librarian at EasyBib, and Neal and Darshan, the Co-CEO’s, and by myself other times. I had to lead some interviews and discussions, while following Emily, Neal, or Darshan in their execution of others.

            The first principle, especially since this project was a partnership between Emily and me, was “collaborate to innovate.” Emily and I interviewed over two-dozen librarians together, but I never felt that we fought for more talk-time during the interview or that we talked our efforts up in front of Neal and Darshan. Rather, we filled the gaps the other left. We would ask the questions the other person forgot to, and never fought to share positive feedback with Neal or Darshan.

            Though we developed a good relationship quickly, building relationships with the librarians and media specialists we were interviewing was more difficult. We had to “get engaged and move beyond success and failure”, staying away from celebrating the interviews that went really well or focusing too much on those we didn’t get at all. I remembered during these instances how my father rarely let me celebrate a single good shot on a golf course, but always insisted that I stay positive until I had putt out the last hole of the entire tournament. All these moments reaffirmed that nothing productive comes of mourning losses or celebrating successes: rather it is the larger picture that determines our success and the learning comes from figuring out why I made even the smallest mistakes. These lessons led me to rewrite the question-list after each interview to help us zone in on what we wanted to learn about the market demand more perfectly.

            Throughout this entire process, I was most inspired by how Neal never praised nor criticized anything Emily or I did. Instead he asked a hundred questions about what we were learning and how we thought the product should be designed. Although I didn’t realize it until I read this article, his questioning forced us to think more deeply about the product and really understand our market demand. Whenever he felt we missed getting a piece of information, like exactly what kind of games educators would want in the product, he would simply ask us as a subtle push to ask the same question in future interviews.

            This article and my many meetings with Neal helped me understand Neal’s leadership style better because he is definitely a leader that doesn’t always praise, but always analyzes to make sure everyone is getting as much as they can out of their tasks. This leadership trait, along with the overall ability to accept and learn from failure, is one that I would like to include in my own unique leadership style. 

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Failure Opens Doors

As I near the end of my internship, I realize the best feedback I have gotten is from the Director of Advocacy, Jackie.  Everyone has tried to help me out, but besides pointing out a few small mistakes, they mostly say, “That’s great” when I hand them something.  It makes it difficult to believe I can make mistakes.  Like Farson and Keyes say in the article, too many compliments “can actually demotivate people” and make them feel “too much is expected of them” (Farson and Keyes, 67).  I’m not sure where I fall in this spectrum, but it doesn’t make me feel like I can fail and get back up; it feels like I especially need to be on my top game to finish strong in this last week.

But it’s not the same with Jackie.  At first I was afraid to give her new work and to speak up, but failing at a few projects actually opened our working relationship.  I was working on the newsletter for HCL last month and wanted her to write a section about the new advocacy efforts.  I quickly realized that all the procedural tips the previous newsletter writer had given me did not apply to Jackie.  She wanted to write her own pieces and became frustrated if I made edits for her, unlike all the other employees who simply wanted me to write their sections for them.  I thought that I knew pretty well how to trim down her writing to fit in the section, that my editing experience was more than sufficient for this small job, but Jackie kept demanding more.  It came to a head when a miscommunication between Jackie and I almost led to the newsletter going out without the proper edits to her section.  She came over to my office freaking out about how unprofessional it was going to look.  I didn’t have time to think or feel bad about mixing up instructions, but immediately went to cancel the release and to call my mentor to make the necessary edits.  In the end, the newsletter went out with the appropriate changes and Jackie calmed down.  I thought the whole experience might have made me feel like a failure of an intern, but instead, it opened up the lines of communication between Jackie and I.  She checks in with me on projects a lot more often, suggesting changes whenever necessary, and instead of assuming changes, I ask her more questions about how statistics and other advocacy related details should be related to the public.

When I lay in bed at night thinking back over my days at Houston Center for Literacy, I thank God for that small failure in communication and the fuller, more constructive relationship it created between Jackie and I.  I’m still learning how to make myself failure-tolerant leader in every aspect of my work at HCL and other areas of my life, but I’m glad I’ve had this one example to experience how useful failure can be.

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At the end of the article it says that effective leaders leave their employees with a mindset not of success or failure, but of learning and experience.  My mentor definitely has this attitude.  Anytime I finish an assignment my mentor asks “Did you find this useful? What did you learn from this exercise?”. These questions help me to see my work from this summer not only in terms of specific assignments, but also what skills and broader ideas I have picked up and how my work fits into my other assignments and the department as a whole. Although the position I am in is one where it is almost impossible to fail, by analyzing what I learn from my work I gain some of the same insights that come from analyzing the successes and failures of trial and error jobs.  I also agree with the idea that analyzing work is much better than praise and that praise can be a demotivator.  After working on one assignment for two weeks, I sent it to my boss for feedback before continuing.  My boss’s comment was “Good Work”.  The lack of more specific feedback made it hard for me to know whether I had really done well or if my boss was just not interested enough in my project to get more involved.  I agree with the article that active involvement of the manager helps creativity and innovation of employees.

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Working with Failure

I have had to deal with failure almost every day this summer. The equipment I have been working to set up and make operational was brand new equipment for Champion Fiberglass and the most work any one had ever done with it was to turn it on and confirm that it worked. As a result, the problems I encountered were as new to me as they were to any one else and it was up to me and another intern to piece together how to fix it.

Very early in the internship, it became clear to me that in order to be successful this summer, we would have to learn from our mistakes. Our typical day consisted of a quick brainstorming session in the morning to figure out what we were going to do that day. The key to these brainstorming sessions was no criticism was allowed whatsoever. A running joke we had that when we got stuck our only possible solution was development of an anti-gravity machine. Once we removed the hesitancy to bring up what we thought might be a stupid idea, however, our brainstorming became much more innovative and thought-provoking as we rapidly bounced ideas back and forth and expanded on each other’s thoughts. Then at the end of the day after we’d tried our ideas from the morning we would analyze what worked and what didn’t. This is where the real insight of our project developed. It turns out we have failed much more than we have succeeded over the course of the summer, but we learned a lot more in these cases compared to when our ideas worked. As we’ve learned more and more about the equipment we have also began to cut down our mistakes because more understanding has lead to more insightful brainstorming.

My mentor and supervisor have also been excellent in fostering an innovative atmosphere for us to work. My supervisor gives us the freedom to go out and try our ideas. In fact, he encourages it. There have been countless occasions where we came to him with an idea and his response would be, “Hmm, sounds interesting. Go out and give it a shot.” Having that freedom and support from above has been key to our success because there has never been that fear of a stupid idea, or unease over reprimand because we made a mistake. Goran, on the other hand, has always seemed intrigued with what we are working on, but careful in handing out praise. Every Friday we meet with him to discuss our progress, but he never asks out right where we are on it. He will ask questions like, “what new things have you encountered with your project this week,” or “what have you learned this week.” These meetings are always more of a discussion than a report on our work and as a result we don’t hesitate to bring up failures. In fact, we discuss failures more often than successes because they are more significant to our understanding of the project. 

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Adaptability and Collaboration is Key

Early in the summer while we were making a plan to complete our project, I pushed one particular strategy more than I should have considering the very limited knowledge I had about how the factory floor worked. Over time, we saw that we were not able to receive data fast enough with that strategy and that the majority of the data we were receiving was inconclusive and would require we extrapolate in order to be able to provide any useful information which was the opposite of what they wanted. The first time the Value Stream Map (VSM), a tool that is used to identify the associated cycle and lead times involved at every step of the process from receiving an order to sending out the final products, guesses were made about how much each step took which made their VSM’s times vary from what was actually happening as the valve was produced. Without more concrete data, we would never be able to suggest which areas in the manufacturing process are the most inefficient and need to be addressed.

            Although it only set us back about a week and a half, that was time that pushed back the completion date of our project. After reading the article, I believe the principle we used to address this failure was more collaboration. We stopped our trips to the shop floor for a day and discussed what we had learned from our time there. We talked to the people who had made the VSM before and asked how they came to their numbers and what could be the best avenues to take to receive the most accurate data. In the end, we created a three fold plan that took everything Anand, Ariel, and I had learned and addressed our three parts of the manufacturing process uniquely. We each decided to adopt a means we thought was best for our division of the process while also incorporated each others strategies to maximize our data collection which in the end would enable us to make clearer judgments of the actions that would need to be suggested to cut the overall lead time of the manufacturing process.

            By also creating a system where we talk about results on a daily basis, we are able to make incremental changes in our processes which has helped us create a new VSM that incorporates more parts in the process than the previous one had and back up our decision to add the new steps through the data we were receiving. In the end, we believe we will be turning in a more comprehensive document despite the fact that it strayed from the style that has used for years. Our close collaboration enabled us to bring some innovation to creating the VSM, and when we discussed our findings with Kiran, he was happy we had done so because we were able to identify several more kaizen bursts for parts of the process that were not depicted in the original VSM. 

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Failing

 The main principle of the article is that failure(under the right conditions) is a learning experience and essentially unavoidable on the path to success unless one is very, very lucky. A large part of my project has involved failure and I can think of several examples where I used the specific practices mentioned.

One of these has been the willingness to fail and to present my failures and reasons why to my mentors/those helping me. The initial idea for my project was quite ambitious and was initially received well by my mentors, with both giving consent to pursue further. As I did research and talked to other physicians however, I learned of several constraints on the patient portion of the survey I intended to distribute. Rather than become discouraged by this failure and try and avoid dealing with it, I made sure to head to my mentors and discuss the issue. They advised me on how to proceed, and as the article recommends, took in interest in how I reached my conclusion and did not chide me for not realizing the problems beforehand. They understood that part of making a successful project is stumbling until solid footing is found and that is what has happened.

In the early stages of my project I also realized that I could not take this on by myself and expect good results. I recognized that I must communicate and collaborate with those more experienced in the field to help guide me in how to conduct my study. I emailed a professor that had spoken in my medical ethics class last semester and asked him for input on my then current survey and any additional advice he could offer. He helped sharpen my focus, remove inappropriate questions, and helped me to understand the proper procedure. In the same vein, I also spoke with an oncologist at the hospital to help look over my survey before distributed it widely and asked for candid feedback about it. Through this I learned what the best site-specific questions were given that medical practice differs somewhat in India compared to the U.S.

Through all the experiences I have become more aware of the necessity of a failure, and what makes a failure a useful one. As the article says, one that is simply due to negligence is different than one that teaches you something you didn’t know beforehand and wouldn’t have been expected to

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The Importance of Fail

The theme of this week’s article seems to go hand-in-hand with the New York Times article about failure as a necessary step towards success. However, it also touches on the subject of innovation and risk-taking, and I feel that these concepts especially are applicable to my experience at Virgo this summer. The project that I’ve been working on at Virgo involves improving shop floor efficiency by two methods: by pointing out manufacturing steps that take too long, but also by suggesting alternative, innovative solutions to decrease lead time. Interestingly, we’ve found that many of our suggestions to “improve” the manufacturing process have actually already been attempted, and they haven’t helped. Changing a system that already works, albeit slowly, is always accompanied by the risk of wasting resources on an alteration that serves no purpose. Why would the company fix a process that’s not broken? Well, if looked at through the lens of this week’s article, constant innovation makes perfect sense. Even though sometimes the initial implementation of these ideas resulted in failure, my experience also shows that just knowing what won’t work is a very useful hint towards figuring out what will work. Those resources weren’t wasted, because the company learned from those mistakes and I can use that information to make better suggestions. 

The latter part of the article where the authors talk about the value of constructive, big-picture teamwork is particularly relevant to my experience at Virgo. Much of my work has been in a team with Alison and Anand and I’ve tried to be supportive of their ideas, even though I may not initially understand them. We are in a unique position where we really are working together as a team and no bonuses or promotions are at stake for us individually. Like Farson and Keyes cite in the article, this environment is perfect for innovation. We’ve supported each other’s suggestions and ideas because they are often what is best for our project, and as a result we’ve been able to undertake a major task that neither one of us could have completed on our own. While one’s instinct is still to put down others’ ideas to get a leg up on the competition, the unique nature of my status as an intern has allowed me to really listen to and apply my teammates’ suggestions, a valuable skill that I hope to continue to use even if I am unfortunate enough to find myself in a work environment that is more prone towards unhealthy competition.

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Learn Early and Often

Though the phrase “fail early and often” was stated numerous times during LEAD 150, I had many reservations towards carrying it out when I began my internship. I wanted to add value to a company that normally hired employees with much more training and experience than I.

However, I realized that the success of my ventures was the most important aspect to consider. As Farson and Keyes suggested, I moved beyond success and failure and instead concentrated on the quality of my work. One of my tasks was to prepare presentations for my mentor. Though I did not know what he was expecting out of my presentations, I made sure that none of the mistakes I made were from carelessness. Furthermore, I did not make the same mistakes repeatedly.

The same mindset helped me as I encountered tasks that I had little experience with. For one of my co-mentors, I was required to write articles for an annual report. Given very little instruction, I was left to my own devices to make the article in whatever way I saw fit. Though my work was not exactly what she was expecting, she appreciated the time and effort I put into it.

Another method of addressing failure that I found to work in my tenure here was collaborating with others to innovate. Many times, I found myself at a loss on how to do things, whether it was writing a report or organizing an Excel document. Instead of helplessly sitting at my desk, I sought out input from others. The revelations that helped me succeed were not as drastic as the ones mentioned in the article, but nonetheless, they helped me triumph over failure.

In my mind, I think the concept of failure-tolerance is very good for success, but I think a better way of approaching things is to learn from every experience, even if it is a success. I would go as far to change the phrase to “learn early and often.” When people fail, they are encouraged to reflect on their mistakes to change future action, but I think that it is equally important to reflect on success and how it is achieved.

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Failure and Leading

Over the course of my internship, I have discovered that the greatest potential for failure comes in understanding the cultural differences between the environment at IFRI and what I am used to in an American work environment.  Everyone works fairly autonomously, and even the heads of the departments are usually working primarily as researchers themselves, so there isn’t much direction given.  This has definitely been a change from what I’m used to.  I was not expecting to be constantly looked after, but I have been given almost no direction.  This has given me a good opportunity to move beyond success and failure in my own work, though.   I have been given the space to essentially take care of what I need to take care of on my own, and so failures in the paper-writing process which would be much more impactful in a classroom setting where much of the process is watched and graded.  I feel that in such a situation where there is less pressure to fail, small failures in the research process have helped me improve the quality of the paper I hope to present.  This has been especially important to me because I did not have a background knowledge of energy policy at all.  One instance of failure that has been beneficial to my paper writing process has been the gradual realization that I picked an extremely broad topic that would have been difficult to address adequately in the course of the summer, and small failures over the course of the summer helped me to narrow down my topic to ensure relevancy.  It has given me the opportunity to realize that there are important lessons to be learned from small failures even without input and direction from others.

The culture of IFRI seems to steer directly away from the collaborative environment encouraged by Farson and Keyes, however.  With everyone working on individual projects, and often working from home, everyone is expected to get things accomplished on their own, often without help and input along the way.  I have taken the initiative to seek feedback and presented my work even though my mentor had not asked about my project at all.  This helped me understand what was expected of me, and while some of the feedback has not always been as constructive as I would like, it has helped me be more critical of myself.

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Don't Look Before You Leap

One thing that I have learned this summer is the importance of risk-taking. As Rice students, people hold us to a higher standard in comparison with others our age; yet as interns, we will never have less expected from us in the workplace. They will expect a certain degree of competence, enthusiasm, and responsibility, but when it comes to creative thinking, we will never be in a better place to throw out our own ideas.

            It took a conversation with one of my mentors to see the value in this way of thinking. After all, we come from a system that does not at all tolerate failure. Taking risks in classes may give you a good story to tell, but if it’s not what the teacher is looking for, too bad. On day one we receive a syllabus that dictates exactly what is going to happen day-by-day, week-by-week, and what is expected from us. Do exactly that, and you will receive that “A” we all love to see. Doing anything else is essentially a voluntary sacrifice of that “A,” one that can hurt us down the road. As we transition from a school environment into the workplace, it can be difficult to shed this mindset and try and take risks.

            A couple of weeks ago I was working in collaboration with others to help pitch the mobile space to one of our clients. We wanted to present our ideas for an entire stand-alone mobile app, or at the very least a mobile-specialized website. All of a sudden, on no notice, the president said she was flying over to meet the client and needed four or five key messages to present. Those of us working on the project immediately scheduled a conference call to determine what these should actually be. Someone else agreed to type up what we discussed and make the final touches before sending them to her and copying us on the email. After receiving the email, I realized that there was another point we could make. I wasn’t sure if it was any good, but I decided to go with my gut and take the chance. I sent the email with my suggestion and reasoning to the group, a group which consisted of one of our company’s president as well as a senior vice president. The risk definitely paid off, and we were not only able to use my suggestion but the president later came and complimented me for being willing to take that risk.

            I was able to do this because I realized something; as interns, we aren’t expected to do something like that. We are at a time where we can throw things around without fear of toppling our entire company. Worst case scenario, they just decide not to use the idea. But good idea or not, we grow each time just from taking the leap, even if we don’t know what’s on the other side. 

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If at first you don't succeed, analyze and move forward

          One failure I have experienced so far is trying to do too much for my summer project here. I originally planned to do a survey part and a data analysis but I realized that I didn’t have enough time or knowledge about my subject needed for the data analysis.  This was disappointing, and I was a bit afraid of discussing it with my mentor because I wasn’t sure how he would react. However, I chose to look at the failure as an opportunity to improve the survey part of the project and amass more data there. When my mentor and I looked at the two parts,  the survey part was deemed more useful and I learned about having to make the best of a situation after the original plan fails.

            After my original ideas fell through, I turned to Farson and Keyes’s idea of collaborating more with my mentor and other doctors who could help me with the project. The original failure came from too little understanding of my subject and poor assessment of feasibility. In order to avoid these mistakes moving forward, I speak regularly with my mentor and bounce ideas off of others that I’ve come to know well. This has also emphasized Farson and Keyes’s idea that a good ideas can come from unexpected sources. Some of the most helpful meetings I’ve had about my survey have been with assistants and administrators who have helped me word it more correctly and translate it properly.

            Moving beyond success and failure is one of the most valuable things I think I could learn from this experience. Recognizing that there was failure but being able to move forward from it by learning from past mistakes is invaluable to our future careers.  Being able to analyze the reasons for my initial failure and use that to make my project better has helped me see the difference in failing and moving beyond success and failure. 

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Failure

Failure is a tricky thing here at MSKCC. When you’ve got treatment choices and patients’ lives on the line, you really can’t afford to fail nonchalantly. But I’ve learned what’s more important, to acknowledge the mistakes early and move towards solutions as quickly as possible.

 As for a personal example from this summer, I recall the moment when I had fumbled the some gene expression results that served as the foundation for my project. I had done all the upper-level analyses correctly, but using the wrong basic data. After spending three weeks working with many people to get up to what I had done, I felt like I had wasted everyone’s time. I was feeling pretty ashamed of my mistake, as foolish as it was, when Dr. Danila told me: “It’s a value-add to have made that mistake. Finding mistakes and solving them is still making progress. What’s important is that you accepted and addressed it – in medicine, ignored and known problems are fraud. Mistakes are human.” Coming out from the meeting, I felt thankful, thankful that he didn’t dwell on my oh-so-stupid mistake. I understand now that empathy is not only appreciated, it’s inspiring – with a clear idea of what I had done wrong, we had talked about exactly how to move forward – I was excited to begin again. 

Much in this way, I’ve made quite a few mistakes this summer. I’ve gotten plenty of “that’s not right”. But each time, working to the finish line has been more satisfying. It felt like making that half court jump shot – the more times you miss, the better it feels when you finally see the swish of the basket.

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Stupid Questions Do Exist

One of the things we discussed during LEAD 150 was making impressions during the first few weeks of our internships, specifically with respect to speaking up in meetings and things of the sort. We were told to avoid “internitis” and make sure that people realize quickly that you’re going to be involved and not simply another lump of flesh.

Every Wednesday we have a big meeting with the whole grant department where we discuss the grants that are currently in the works and debate over whether they are grant-worthy and whether everything that needs to be addressed has been addressed so that the Board of Directors will have the information that they need to make their decisions. I wanted to make sure that I spoke up enough during the first meeting, but since I knew absolutely nothing about the grant process or really anything about nonprofits, all I could do was ask questions, so I did. I made sure to clarify things that I didn’t understand and ask for elaboration on things that I wanted to learn more about. By the time the meeting was over and we were getting ready to leave, I was feeling pretty good about myself and satisfied with the fact that I had made an impression; however, as I was soon going to find out, I had made an impression, just not the one I had wanted to.

After the meeting ended, my mentor and I walked back to our offices where she told me that they can’t take the time to explain everything to me since the meetings usually take a long time and the others probably didn’t appreciate the questions.

It hadn’t even occurred to me that I might be doing more harm than good to my reputation and getting off to a bad start with the whole department by asking too many questions. Although it was a harsh realization, it turned out to be quite beneficial for three reasons. First, I began to ask only the questions that I absolutely couldn’t find out on my own, which meant that when I did ask, they were much better questions than they would have been otherwise, and my coworkers noticed this. Second, I asked my questions in a one on one setting rather than in meetings so that I could use this time to develop personal relationships with my coworkers rather than keep them imprisoned in a three-hour meeting. Third, I quickly learned to evaluate everything with a keener eye for what effects it would have on the people around me in a way that made me much more aware of how I was perceived around the office, allowing me to better manage the impressions I made on others.

The most important thing to me, however, was that I didn’t simply stop asking questions after this one setback, I asked better questions in a smarter way. I acknowledged my mistake, took steps to correct it, and tried again.

[failuretolerant-blog]

Embracing Risks

Let me start off this post by saying that I am the world’s worst risk-taker. Literally, the worst. I would much rather ask questions and plan and figure out exactly what to do and how to do it, than dive into a project hoping for the best. However, this summer I like to think that I have gotten better at taking risks, although they’re definitely not life-or-death choices. 

The risks I’ve taken this summer have stemmed from my fear of being “that annoying intern,” the one who asks too many questions and can’t do anything for herself. I’ve tried to be super sensitive to the fact that my mentor and the director of my office, who are definitely the two busiest people I work with, have very packed schedules and may not have time to answer every minute question I have as they pop up. Instead, I have tried to embrace risk-taking in the form of making more executive decisions about my projects. The best example of this was a report my office’s director asked me to put together. He basically asked me to pull research on a topic he could use to prep for an upcoming interview he was doing with a newspaper. He seemed like he was in a hurry when he stopped by to ask me, so I figured I should just get to work instead of pressing for more details. I put something together and gave it to him, asking him to let me know if this was what he was looking for.

I don’t know if he knew it, but my director did exactly what Farson and Keyes suggested by analyzing my work instead of blindly praising it. He said my work was good, but also pointed areas that he particularly liked and areas that he was confused about. When I took a second stab at the report, I took this feedback into account. I made it a point to include more of what he liked, and fixed what he didn’t like. Seeing that these changes made the report rather lengthy, I also went ahead and included a “general findings” section at the beginning that highlighted key findings and trends. This second report seemed to be what my director was looking for; he ended up sending out my report to the entire department.

My approach to this project was definitely different than the approach I’d take if it was a paper for a class at Rice. At school, we’re encouraged to follow directions, and our professors make themselves available throughout the semester so that we can seek out step-by-step feedback to make sure that we’re on the right track. There’s definitely a lot less hand-holding in the real world, and I’m glad that I was able to adapt in a small way to this difference in my office.