The OffBeat #1: Failure Fridays
The best 20 minutes of your work week
It sucks to fail.
Mistakes are brutal to your ego, especially in a work culture that doesn’t cushion the blow by embracing failure as evidence of experimentation.
So set the tone. Try scheduling a weekly 20-minute Failure Fridays meeting. If you lead a team, ask your direct reports to humor you and give it a shot for a few weeks. If you’re an individual contributor, propose it at your next team sync as a test to strengthen morale and encourage responsible risk-taking.
Guidelines:
Make it towards the end of the day when people are winding down for the week.
When I used to do this in the office, we’d all grab a drink to set a happy-hour-like tone. If people are down for that in the Zoomverse, great. If not, don’t force it.
You go first. Share something you failed at or messed up that week, and what you learned from it.
Pick the person to go next. If they’re hesitant or claim they can’t think of anything, give examples: bad time management, over budget on something, a campaign under-performed on a key metric, got flustered in a presentation to the CEO.
When they share, set the tone of laughing with them, commiserating, and sharing if you’ve experienced something similar.
Stick with it for a few weeks at minimum, then gauge if it feels like people are becoming more comfortable being creatively courageous.
This isn’t about the actual examples people share in the meeting. It’s about cultivating an environment of trust and support in which f*ck-ups are not only OK, they’re expected.
Have a great week,
Allison
Love this—the point of talking about failure is to learn from it and not repeat said failure. As I tell my kid, a mistake or a fail is a learning opportunity. You take time to reflect on what you learned, what not to do in the future/what to do differently in the future, and, if warranted, apologize. Then, and this is critical, move on. Don’t wallow in the fail. That’s counterproductive.
I'm taking introductory improv classes for fun through my parks and rec department. The instructor gave us the gift of the "failure bow": If we really goof in an obvious way or our brain freezes we give a bow with a big flourish and intone dramatically; "I have failed!" Everyone is supposed to applaud this. It's self-awareness made visible.