Sigrid practicing. Photo courtesy of Victor Valore.
This is a provocative article suggesting that it’s a good thing if an employer loses good people. To be clear, it’s not a good thing if an employer loses people who quit in disgust. Rather, if you are cultivating an engaged work environment in which everyone is encouraged to move onward and upward, then there is a price to pay. That price is that sometimes employees take advantage of external opportunities.
The author of the article is Drew Falkman from a firm called Modus Create, a technology services company with a soft spot for people development. He suggests that if you are losing good people it is a sign of an engaged work environment that attracts transparently ambitious people. Ambitious people will regard your workplace as an exceptional diving board into the pool of life. These can be good people to work with.
What do you think? Could your new employer brand be “diving boards are us”? The reason I ask, is that most people are only familiar with what competitive diving looks like momentsafter the diver has taken flight. But in the yearsprior to jumping the diver will have put much effort into developing courage, strength, and skill. Would you have a better workplace if a larger fraction of your employees were constantly building towards a visible and transparent goal? This spirit of growing and striving would be a great workplace culture for employee and employer alike.
This change of attitude on the employer’s part redefines performance excellence as an act of motion amidst a growth mindset, not a final accomplishment that presumes a fixed state. A workplace that is always striving performs better than one in which managers treat their best staff as collectibles.
Managers are notorious for trying to hold onto their top-performers and keep them at their current level. It’s so convenient for the manager, having excellent people who are prohibited from seeking new opportunities, locked into place just-so, delivering double the productivity. These people practically manage themselves, and the manager doesn’t need to spend extra hours training them or replacing them when they leave. If the manager can cultivate a team like this, perhaps the manager could get the biggest bonus.
But thinking about the whole institution and the economy in general, locking-down high performers is a recipe for stagnation. Perhaps the millennials were right? Maybe we should stop tolerating mediocrity and take for granted that generalized career ambition is part-and-parcel of performance and workplace engagement.
Employers are increasingly desperate for good hires into the senior ranks, and they’re blunt that they should always be free to bring in good people from other institutions. So, as a society, the “correct” opinion is that employers and employees alike should be moving everyone upward and onward. Therefore, career-growth exits are a good thing.
But it gets better.
Falkman also suggests that former employees are valuable to your organization as well. Former employees can speak highly of their work experience at your organization, improving the employer and customer brand. Supportive former employees can also become committed customers, suppliers, or investors. You can go the extra mile and organize this resource of boomerang employees, building current staff to eventually be part of an alumni pool who continue to grow, keep in touch with their peers, and make themselves available as boomerang employees.
Every now and then a contrary opinion comes along that you really need to take seriously. This is one of the good ones.
Hear no evil, speak no ev… Well you know the rest. Photo courtesy of Barbara Burton.
Do you swear in the workplace? I bet you try not to, at least not too often. But sometimes it slips out, and sometimes it just feels right. What do we know about the effect profanity has on our candor and our emotional closeness to others?
Years ago, I was driving my two-and-a-half year old daughter to childcare. It was cold out, and she was safely bucked into the car seat in the back. We lived on a major street, and I drove Westbound a half-mile to the nearest red light. There was a car in front of us with the right turn signal on, but they weren’t turning. My daughter said “Get out of the fawa way.” My head tilted, and I ran the phrase through my head. “Sweetie,” I asked, “what did you just say?”
“Get out of the fucking way,” she announced. I contained my laughter. This was her first F-bomb, and I had just enough self-control to realize I couldn’t teach her this was funny. I had to keep this social.
“Darling,” I asked, “where did you learn to talk like that?”
“Mummy talks that way every time she drives.” I gripped the wheel and tensed my facial muscles, using all of my life force to resist laughing. The light changed, and we continued driving. I turned into the ever-familiar cul-de-sac, and we stepped into the childcare to take off her shoes and jacket. I asked our childcare provider, Liliana, if I could borrow her phone. I said there was something I needed my wife to hear. Liliana said she knew what this was about. She was experienced.
I phoned my wife who was at home on maternity leave bonding with our second child. “Hello?” she answered. “Hi, your daughter just said something and I want you to hear it” I said. “Oh, this can’t be good” she cringed. I handed my daughter the phone and prompted her to “Say to mummy what you hear her say every time she drives.” She was wearing a cute little dress with pink flowers. She held the phone to her ear and yelled: “Fuckin’ mooove!”
What the Science Says About Profanity
What does swearing accomplish, really? Citing excerpts from Emma Byrne’s Swearing is Good For You a Wired article from January 2018 described several behavioral experiments involving swearing. In one, test subjects were asked to submerge their hands in ice water until they could not tolerate it any more. Some were asked to state neutral terms describing furniture, and others were asked to say a profanity.
“…when they were swearing, the intrepid volunteers could keep their hands in the water nearly 50 percent longer as when they used their non-cursing, table-based adjectives. Not only that, while they were swearing the volunteers’ heart rates went up and their perception of pain went down. In other words, the volunteers experienced less pain while swearing.”
Enduring physical pain was also associated with aggressive game-playing, and a willingness to harm others in a simulation in which they could choose to shock others. There’s a cross-over between insensitivity, enduring discomfort, mean-ness, and profanity. Hence our vocabulary is so much richer when driving.
Swearing also makes people physically stronger. Athletes can attest to this. In one study cited by the Guardian people swearing while operating an exercise bike saw their peak power increase by 28 watts. In another test, profanity increased grip strength by 2.1kg.
We can envision a profanity-rich working environment where people exert physical effort and occasionally get hurt. I imagine construction sites, the armed forces, and resource sectors as places where swearing might just be a normal coping mechanism for the physical environment. But what about an office environment?
Directly quoting Byrne’s book once again, an article from the Cut noted
“From the factory floor to the operating theatre, scientists have shown that teams who share a vulgar lexicon tend to work more effectively together, feel closer, and be more productive than those who don’t,” she writes. …A study published earlier this year backs up this and other research, suggesting swearing with colleagues can help create “a sense of belonging, mutual trust, group affiliation … and cohesion.”
Referencing other research, the article noted that profanity “…does still carry some social risk — it’s still a little bit taboo — so it imparts a feeling of trust in whomever you’re swearing with.”
Profanity Must Be Distributed Fairly
It’s interesting that we would trust people who swear more. On one hand, people are going against the current to express a more candid emotional state. On the other hand, people who break all the rules tend to swear more… and those people aren’t more trustworthy. There’s a good review of the literature by Scott McGreal in Psychology Today, in which he looks at three different studies about honesty and swearing. McGreal concludes the findings are mixed and sometimes contradictory.
A frustrating feature of this trust and solidarity is the double-standard on the use of profanity. In the article in the Cut, Byrne noted men and women used to both swear with abandon until the early 18th century. Then women were encouraged to adopt cleaner language. Men, by contrast retained the right to swear, using their power to express a full range of emotion. To this day, there is more judgement when women swear, compared to the men’s presumed freedom.
My question is, if there’s a workplace that has a mixture of men and women, how are people to experience equality and camaraderie without a level playing-field for profanity? If it’s male-stereotyped work involving physical strength and the endurance of pain and discomfort, do we disadvantage women in those workplaces by discouraging them from swearing? And what about female-dominated work in health care, child care, and food services that often require strength and the enduring of pain and discomfort? Those are customer-facing work environments, so some decorum is in order. Are we discouraging full workplace performance by requiring lady-like vocabularies?
Besides, who ever said that women should swear less in the first place?
One thing’s for certain, this opinion did not come from my wife.
teenage confusion. Photo courtesy of Pabak Sarkar.
I wish I was more insecure, so I could relate better to colleagues who struggle with their insecurity. I keep missing opportunities to share moments of vulnerability. I can’t tap into that common language where we all wish we were better. People watch me, waiting for me to trip-up, and then I succeed. Then they stop watching. This is not how you get likes.
Perhaps I can overcome this challenge by doing more research.
My greatest frustration is articles proclaiming that almost everyone is insecure. From a Huffington Post article by Susan Winter:
Every human being wonders if they’re “okay.” That’s the big secret no one shares and no one wants to share. …at the core of every human is the desire to be accepted and seen as valuable in the eyes of those around us. …There will be times you’ll feel on top of the world and times you’ll doubt your worth. This is normal. It’s a part of our forward movement as we take stock of who we are, in transit to who we’re becoming.
I feel like the captain of a Star Trek vessel observing “the planet of the insecure” hesitating about whether I should help. If I could cure this planet of its insecurities, would their social order fall apart? Would I take away that one thing that moves them forward every day?
What Teenagers Learn About Status and Insecurity
In this age of industrialized narcissism, the insecure are way better at delivering photos of their perfect life, drawing attention to their accomplishments, and working late to meet high expectations. In an Inc.com article Jessica Stillman cites Yale psychologist Mitch Prinstein, who bemoans that a growing number of platforms are making it easier for us to gain status. Prinstein differentiates between two types of popularity, status and likability. Those who pursue and achieve high status tend towards “aggression, addiction, hatred, and despair.”
It’s great television.
In another article Stillman argues you should be relieved if you were not a cool kid in high school. Cool kids get their reputation through behaviours that must become increasingly extreme in order to keep up with their subgroup. At some point these antics veer into criminal behaviour and drug use which peers realize isn’t cool at all: “by the age of 22, these ‘cool kids’ are rated as less socially competent than their peers.”
By contrast, those who focused on developing one really close friendship “reported lower levels of social anxiety and depression and higher self worth as young adults.” Nerds and healthy people work on their likeability. Not facebook likes – that’s just a type of status. I’m talking about people liking you for who you really are. This is hard work. You need to make yourself vulnerable to close friends. Sincerely attempt to improve yourself. Be authentic in your words and deeds. Back to Susan Winter’s Huffington Post article…
A truly empowered person can look at their shortcomings and seek improvement. The arrogantly insecure must only see a mirror that reflects their perfection. …The nature of growth requires embracing the new and unexplored. Security is opposed to growth, as growth is chaotic and unsettling. Insecurity is the gift of wondering what comes next in our discovery process. [Emphasis added]
Insecurity is a good thing? I’m furious.
Defining Emotional Security and Its Evil Twin, Insecurity
When doing people analytics, the first pass at the numbers often hinges on a data definition that needs better clarity. Humanity is ambiguous and the closer we get to precisely measuring people, the more the human element claps-back at the empirical system, exposing that it’s the quantitative models themselves that are vulnerable.
Insecurity is “a feeling of general unease or nervousness that may be triggered by perceiving oneself to be vulnerable or inferior in some way, or a sense of vulnerability or instability which threatens one’s self-image or ego.”
Wikipedia has a great article on emotional security, which by default gets into insecurity. Wikipedia is the source of consensus amateur opinion, which is perfect for you and me. I mean you. No offense. Insecurity is “a feeling of general unease or nervousness that may be triggered by perceiving oneself to be vulnerable or inferior in some way, or a sense of vulnerability or instability which threatens one’s self-image or ego.”
Already we’re in a pickle given Brené Brown’s research that the quality of our relationships depends on our ability to make ourselves vulnerable to others on a topic of personal shame. To go deep in a relationship, we must choose to be insecure. Those high school kids with one close friend were onto something.
Is There Anything Tangible We Can Do About Insecurity?
Is there anything tangible about insecurity? Yes. Wikipedia says
The concept [of Emotional security] is related to that of psychological resilience in as far as both concern the effects which setbacks or difficult situations have on an individual. However, resilience concerns over-all coping, also with reference to the individual’s socioeconomic situation, whereas the emotional security specifically characterizes the emotional impact. In this sense, emotional security can be understood as part of resilience.
Some people have a status and/or demeanor with which they can weather setbacks better than others. Therefore the emotional state of insecurity relates to 1) things that do in fact happen to us, 2) our ability to adapt to those things that happen including our own actions, and 3) our perspective and emotional state that arises from our experiences and adaptations.
This trifecta reveals that there are multiple responses to these shocks to our lives. We can prevent bad things from happening through precautions and defenses. We can mitigate after things have happened through insurance claims, emotional debriefs with friends, or by pressing charges. We can improve our adaptations by upping our game (by trying harder or changing our methods as individuals), or fighting back against a collective injustice (e.g. go to a rally or make a targeted donation), or sometimes just letting others win (e.g. I hereby choose to load the dishwasher).
Or we can choose a different perspective and emotional state, such as accepting flaws in ourselves, in others, and in the world at large. There is comfort in humility. If you don’t like that, there’s always hope. Choose your emotional posture. Shape the clouds with your own bare hands.
What a Secure Workplace Looks Like
Now, let’s consider what this means in the workplace. If an employee knows what is expected of them every day, they can correctly self-assess if they are delivering on expectations and change course accordingly. If an employee has one good friend in the workplace, they can share vulnerable moments in which they are reassured and accepted as who they are. If an employee is mistreated or put at risk, they can only prevent and mitigate if they are free to complain, talk to the union, or refuse unsafe working conditions. If the employee faces unexpected dental expenses or fears poverty in retirement, they focus better when their employer provides pensions and benefits.
Take insecurity seriously, it’s the main engine.
The employer is asking people to do work for them, and in return offers an environment that is economically, physically, and emotionally reassuring to their security. Take insecurity seriously, it’s the main engine.
There we go, my work is done. It’s amazing what you can learn about a topic you know nothing about by putting a few hours into research and explaining things. It feels accomplished. It’s not that I was feeling insecure earlier. I wasn’t. I’m only doing this for you.
(Repost from October 19, 2017) Are the best leaders currently excellent? No, they are not. The best leaders are those who always strive to become a little bit stronger in the near future. In a recent article in the Harvard Business Review the authors identify that Good Leaders are Good Learners.[link] Leaders who are in “learning mode” tend to develop stronger leadership skills than their peers.
This learning mode is exhibited through three behaviors:
“First, leaders set challenging learning goals in the form of ‘I need to learn how to…’”
“Next, they find ways to deliberately experiment with alternative strategies.”
“Finally, leaders who are in learning mode conduct fearless after-action reviews, determined to glean useful insights from the results of their experimentation.”
Several organizational indicators of the fixed-mindset mentality are contrary to the idea of a “learning mode.” Consider psychometric testing that selects the most innately qualified leaders on a snapshot basis. How useful is this information if you can’t identify an upward trend? If the rules in your business keep changing, what use do you have for a leader who was top-performing under last year’s rules? Surely the best leaders are the ones who can move upward and onward from any new starting point. You get to change the rules more often with these types of leaders. The world is experiencing more changes of the rules, so these types of people are well-suited for the current era.
Also consider the use of forced ranking performance appraisals and winner-take-all reward systems. Basically, these systems use backward-looking performance indicators that anoint those at a high performance level as worthy of recognition. But with a learning mode mindset, those mitigating from a disadvantageous starting point might be your new heroes. Especially if they are learning and leading along the way.
My interpretation is that the “learning mode” mindset is simply the leadership-development element of an engaged workplace. If you’re required to lead an engaged learning organization, only those with a growth mindset will excel. And when they excel, the business will perform better. So the leader, the culture, and organizational performance will move in synch.
Leaders cannot get fearless feedback unless they have fostered a workplace of high trust and two-way communication. Leaders cannot openly name the things they need to learn unless they have sense of humility and an absence of back-stabbing amongst leaders. Leaders cannot experiment with alternative strategies unless they have permission to fail; an onus of perfection would oblige leaders to stick to the tried-and-true.
It’s reassuring to know that a variety of broader truths are coming out of the evidence. Engagement, learning, leadership, and change are all built on a foundation of focus, collaboration, curiosity, and trust.
Now if only we could make sure those types of people are actually put in charge, I think we would be set. But that doesn’t always happen, does it? It’s a warning-shot to those who think they are already awesome. Excellence is in knowing your next step.
Exed Formation continue à l’Ecole polytechnique. Photo courtesy of Ecole polytechnique.
What if junior staff and those far from head office knew more than their superiors? It’s an impolite question which may offend those who have worked so hard to get to the top. But it’s an important question to ask.
In February 2016 the Government of Canada implemented the Phoenix payroll system, and it was bungled from the start. According to the Auditor General’s report in Spring 2018, mistakes were consistently made by three Phoenix executives that negated the input and information coming from those lower ranking than themselves, and those who did not work in their particular bunker. Auditor’s reports make for great reading, because they are often “true crime” page-turners of corporate malfeasance. Let’s take a closer look.
The Productivity of New Employees at the Miramichi Pay Centre
The first stage of the Phoenix project was to centralize staff working with the old software, then the new software would be brought in. But the project team chose Miramichi, New Brunswick as the geographic location for centralization. The previous system was staffed by people all over the country, so the move to Miramichi was a tough sell. Many experienced pay advisors chose not to move.
Because of the move, there was a loss of experience and a drop in productivity. A lot of staff were new. Think to the first time you have done anything – you’re slower until you hit your stride. It takes months to get on top of the work, after which you eliminate errors and do things faster and easier. But there was no allowance for this ramp-up in the Phoenix schedule, and no anticipation this time was even needed. Prior to the move, each pay advisor could handle an average workload of 184 pay files. After the move, productivity dropped to 150 files.
This was troublesome because Public Services and Procurement Canada had expected productivity would rise to 200 files per advisor. This gap played out on the grand scale.
…Miramichi pay advisors could handle a total of about 69,000 pay files, not the 92,000 files the Department had transferred to the Pay Centre. …outstanding pay requests were already increasing because of centralization, and pay advisors in Miramichi were already complaining of excessive workload and stress. …Even though pay advisors were less productive than what was expected of them, Phoenix executives still expected that their productivity would more than double when they started to use Phoenix. [Paragraphs 1.71-1.72]
Some Interpretations on How to Mitigate a Tactical Blunder
If information was shared and accepted, there might have been a clear opportunity to overcome the problems at the Pay Centre. Centralization required either the acceptance of a downshift in experience level and hence more staff would be required. Or they could allow additional time for expertise and productivity to slowly build. As a third alternative, centralization would need to include locations where there was an established labour market.
But these are all tactical solutions to tactical problems. The strategic issue is that powerful people were negating information that was coming from the ground. It’s a “no complaining” mindset. And because the tactical complaints were real, leadership decisions to negate these voices caused tactical problems to overpower strategy.
Yes, Org Charts and Internal Audits are Important
The larger and more complicated a project is, the more important internal audit becomes. The Auditor General’s report asserts that a proper audit prior to implementation “would have given the Deputy Minister an independent source of assurance… that could have resulted in a different implementation decision.” There were guidelines in place for independent review, but the review was controlled by three Phoenix executives. Those executives determined the interview questions and the list of interviewees. The interviewees chosen were all members of the Phoenix project team, who were under the thumb of those same executives. So, watch what you say…
The project had significant problems with governance and the chain of command. The organizational chart shows a reporting structure that bottlenecks through the three Phoenix executives who in turn reported to the Deputy Minister. There was no direct line to the Deputy Minister that was unfiltered by those three people. Say anything you want, and they’ll pass it along. Or not.
The Fake Consultation Meeting
In order for a meeting to be productive, you need the right people in the room and freedom for those people to share information and opinions. However, the key meeting prior to implementation was rigged to provide one-directional information flow. The briefing was January 29, 2016 when 30 deputy ministers from across government were told that Phoenix was about to be implemented. Fourteen departments and agencies provided feedback prior to the meeting that they had “significant concerns with Phoenix”. But the people leading the project assured those in attendance that all the issues had been resolved. Critics were cautioned that any delays would cost too much money and cause a knock-on series of additional delays. They were going ahead.
The project’s leaders didn’t have to try hard to win people over. That is because Public Services and Procurement Canada chose this particular briefing meeting because it did not have any decision-making authority.
As an information-sharing and advisory forum, the Committee could not formally challenge the information it received from Public Services and Procurement Canada or the decision to implement Phoenix. [Paragraph 1.100]
All subsequent stories were about pay advisors struggling to get out from under a backlog as their workload doubled while grappling with a new piece of software. In the story of this project’s failure there is little discussion about the quality of the new software itself, because the project was eaten alive by the landscape.
Appropriate Leadership Styles in Information-Heavy Strategic Efforts
It’s too bad there weren’t low-level people who were free to speak their mind about how things were going. And it’s curious how high-ranking people could develop a lifestyle where they never talk to lower-ranking people. Why do leaders do this to themselves? I know that democracy can be unpleasant and messy. And egalitarianism involves a lot of extra work. But for senior people to be so single-minded in their goals that they would bar feedback from those they are affecting goes beyond arrogance and into strategic self-harm.
It’s like reverse-provincialism. Provincialism is the notion that there are people living in remote areas who are less sophisticated and overly concerned with their local issues, to the detriment of higher-level goals. But what if people in the provinces and remote pockets of the hierarchy are the ones who have a better grasp of the truth? What do we do about high-level people in head offices who know nothing about what’s happening in the field? What do we do about people who think their big fancy plans are brilliant and best, when they are really just playing fancy board games for which the only prize is a slightly more expensive used car.
I know what we should do with these people. We should teach them.
Iowa Loses to Wisconsin. Photo courtesy of Phil Roeder.
Several of the things that make work unpleasant are actually making you more effective. And that bodes well for increasing your value, improving your job security, and advancing your career.
I have a confession to make. I keep a list of things that I have failed at. It’s on the back-page of my in-house accountability document, the “boast report” where I write down my team’s accomplishments for the year. Only a few people have read it, contrary to the very spirit of boasting.
The document came in handy one time when my value was questioned. My own boss simply forwarded the document to another senior leader, and that was the end of debate. It was seven pages long… in bullet form. I doubled-down after that and started to list efforts where I had attempted and failed. It’s one of my favorite things to do.
Talking About Mistakes Improves Learning and Relationships
We have come a long way since feeling shame about our mistakes. And talking openly about our failures is considered a key to success.
We must now think of talking openly about mistakes as a key to success. A New York Times article by Oset Babur from August 17, 2018 delves into the research on meaningful failures.
Babur talks with Allison Wood Brooks from Harvard Business School, who encourages people to discuss their failures. That is because “…discussing failures can help to humanize the sharer by making them seem more approachable and relatable in the workplace. It also generally increased levels of so-called ‘benign envy,’ which can motivate and drive employees to perform better.”
It brings to mind the principle from Brené Brown’s famous TED talk that making yourself vulnerable is the key to meaningful relationships.
By contrast, boasting about your achievements creates malicious envy. Attempts to convey an image of perfection are “…harmful for those in leadership positions who risk coming across as disingenuous..” It’s an in-person version of the effects of Facebook, that if everyone is portraying their best moments, it makes us collectively miserable we’re not doing as well as everyone else. To be precise, if we are engaging with others about what is truly happening in their lives, we become more connected and happier. But if we’re passive observers of these boasts, we become increasingly unhappy.
Babur interviews Amy Edmonston from Harvard Business School who describes different types of failures. One failure type is called intelligent failure, which occurs “when we’re working in areas in which we don’t have expertise or experience, or in areas that are unchartered in a broad, industry-wide sense.” Intelligent failures are a result of exploration and they generate new information. Refusing to talk about failure prevents learning, causing a recurrence of the same mistake. You need a safe environment where you can trust that talking about failure will be valuable.
Constructive Friction – How Jerks Make You More Effective
But you don’t want to be too safe. It’s also helpful talking to people you disagree with. To summarize, jerks make you more productive. An August 2018 Linkedin article by Michael Arena reports on research from Stanford University’s Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao when describing feedback on ideas produced in-house:
…constructive friction is essential to scaling ideas because the resistance to the initial concept creates a pressure-testing effect that encourages iteration and co-creation. …when ideas and concepts are modified in response to friction from another team, their perspective is incorporated, therefore enhancing the likelihood of broader organizational endorsement. Internal friction, creates organizational lift—much the way headwinds assist with an aircraft’s takeoff.
Arena notes that there is a distinction between constructive friction and destructive friction. Yes, there are jerks who are just dragging things down and poisoning the organizational culture. The positive force is constructive colleagues on rival teams that provide brutal-yet-accurate feedback that your first and second drafts are not going to fly. It’s as if we need a companion course for respectful workplace workshops, that if you truly love your colleagues you must give powerful feedback.
Is there anyone in your workplace who cares for you in this way? I hope so. Sometimes you need friends who always take your side. But other friends keep you guessing. And it’s the ones that keep you guessing that are helping you grow.
Instability and Uncertainty Cause Your Brain to Learn
In an Inc.com article from August 2018 Jessica Stillman shares research that you only learn when you are uncertain about the outcome. The research comes from Yale’s Daeyeol Lee who did research on monkeys.
…scientists taught a group of monkeys to hit various targets for a reward of tasty juice. Sometimes the odds of a particular target producing a sweet treat were fixed … Sometimes the target was more unpredictable… If the monkeys could predict how often a target would pay off, brain regions associated with learning basically shut down. When the monkeys couldn’t guess what would happen, their learning centers lit up.
Once you have figured out the best way of doing something, such as your commute home, you stop thinking about it and don’t try to improve the outcome. “For this reason, stability kills learning.”
Stillman recommends that in order to keep learning, you need to seek the unpredictable and bring “strategic instability” into your life. She recommends travel, change of routine, new projects, and seeking unusual perspectives, including a list that she got from Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison.
The Best Workplace Culture is Not Too Cozy
You may have thought that if you achieved success, you might get to live a life that is easier. You won’t have to deal with jerks, things will finally become settled and comfortable, and you will only have to talk about success. But the opposite is true. To be a winner you must expose yourself to constant disruption, seek out the jerks, and talk openly about your failures. You can’t climb to the top and rest, because that pile of people below you is still moving. You must always be in play, always strive to break even and get ahead. Excellence is in the striving, not in being there.
Talking about failure without punishment depends on the trust level in the organization. The high-productivity learning organization needs a workplace culture that nurtures, provides support, and fosters trust. Only then can we get that savage feedback we desperately need. Only then can we stay constantly on-edge with new changes that keep us learning every day.
You can slip into bed at night knowing that on average, the world is just. These uncomfortable moments feel good when they end. To sleep, perchance to fail.
Stuart Murray Speaks 