“Why I hire people who fail”, explained Jeff Stibel over a decade ago. Not only did he hire them, but he established a “failure wall” at their corporate office and encouraged people to post on the wall their own failures and the lessons learned from them.[1] Crazy, right?
Maybe it’s not so crazy. Maybe we should value failure more, viewing it not as an end result but as part of the process of overcoming challenges and finding success.[2] Maybe we should encourage failure in the classroom and in the workplace—or at least we should become more tolerant of it. Or maybe I’m too biased to present a fair argument. After all, my life has been a string of failures. I flunked out of college before I pulled myself together and made it through a Ph.D. program. I’ve published a handful of research articles of which I am proud, but my list of rejection letters is much longer than my list of publications. I won’t even get started on my personal life. Let’s just say I’m that as a husband and father I am imperfect at best.
I’ll probably always have my own biases in this area, but I think they are well founded. Anytime we try something new or try to accomplish something amazing, we’re probably not going to get it right the first time. But failure is just a step on the path toward success, and failure helps us enjoy our success more when we finally accomplish our goals. If we are afraid to fail—too afraid to try new things or meet new people—we lose out on opportunities. Opportunities to learn new skills, forge new relationships, build self-confidence, and follow exciting career opportunities.
And the same applies to the workplace (I’m a management professor so you knew I would get here eventually). Anytime we ask an employee to do something new, they might not get it right the first time. But allowing them to fail helps put them on the path to success and helps them enjoy their success. It also helps managers figure out who is and who isn’t willing to do what it takes succeed. It helps people gain self-confidence, and, ultimately, be better and more valuable contributors to the organization.
I don’t have a failure wall. Instead, I share a selection of journal rejection letters with my students each fall semester. The letters are pretty brutal sometimes and they get more than a few laughs from my students. I don’t mind. The papers were all published eventually, and the rejections became just a step on the road to success.
Jonathan Shaffer, Pickens Professor of Management
[1] Stibel, J. (2011, December 09). Why I hire people who fail. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2011/12/why-i-hire-people-who-fail
[2] There’s an entire body of research on the difference between mastery goals and performance goals. Mastery goals may entail more failure in the short term, but also more success in the long run.
