Women at Work - Let’s Talk About Our Failures

0:00I don't dwell in failure now because I've learned that every single failure I've ever had and some of them have been doozies and potential career enders. I've come out of them, if nothing else, more empathetic toward others. Yeah. Well, can you tell us a little bit more? I'll tell you about one. Yeah. You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Amy Bernstein. I'm Amy Gallo.

0:28We're here with our former co-host and friend, Sarah Green Carmichael, who's one of the very few people we feel comfortable enough revisiting our professional failures with. But we also know she is going to push us, she's going to test our thinking. Yeah. And bring in research findings. And build up to some aha moments. Oh my god, no pressure, guys. I'm so glad that when you thought of failure, you thought of me. No, we just knew that you would bring You would bring the honesty, but you'd also bring the humanity. I'll do my best. So why are we revisiting the times? Something's gone wrong, or we felt like it had, or someone told us it had. Failures usually subjective, and not one person's fault. But the ways people tend to treat women too often set us up to fail. Or leave us to believe we have only ourselves to blame. There are unrealistic expectations. There are nonexistent or useless feedback.

1:25their underestimation of our competence causes so much stress and anxiety that we actually do sometimes underperform. But everyone fails. We don't want you to feel insecure about your failures. So we're going to talk about ours. We're going to talk about some practical matters, too, like what to do when you're on a project that looks like it's doomed, or if you're reporting to a boss whose standards are just too high. So, Sarah.

1:57Not to put you on the spot, but feel free to go first. Sarah, tell us about your failures. Well, when I heard about the topic, I tried to think about how would I define a failure because I think it's something bigger than just a mistake. I think it has to be something where there are many either failures of judgment or process mistakes that add up to something that is deeply unpleasant and hard to reverse or maybe a missed opportunity, something where we fail to live up to our potential. Yeah. I like that distinction between mistake and failure, because I can think about lots of mistakes I've made. Every day. Yes. Like in the last hour, but those aren't failures, right? And actually, when I think about one particular failure, which I'll share in a moment, but it was a series of mistakes that led to something that was unfixable.

2:55And for me, my filter was I should have known better. And that was the moment when, you know, I got that gut punch of recognition. I knew that was failure. Yeah. So you could tell us about one. Okay. So the story that really came to mind as the most obvious example from my professional history is actually what I did right after leaving HBR in 2018. So I consider in some ways my decision to take a job at Barron's.

3:25to be a failure and that there were red flags that I overlooked. And taking the wrong job is not something that is easily rectified. You can't just sort of hit update or refresh and reboot that. It takes a while to get out of it. So just to sort of set the scene a little bit, if we go back in our minds to the fall of 2018, I've decided it's after almost 12 years at HBR, it's time to move on.

3:54I call up an old boss of mine who's, you know, at that point was the editor-in-chief of Barron's. And we sort of proceed from there. I don't do a lot of, I'm not like shopping around for other jobs. I just sort of call her and we sort of go from there. You guys throw me an amazing goodbye party that's very emotional for me. And then I start working at Barron's and like it just becomes clear that this is not a great fit for me, that on paper it all made sense, but the reality is very different.

4:24It's before COVID and I'm working remotely at a time and in a team that's not really used to having a ton of remote workers. So I'm very isolated. And so then as I'm starting to sort of get this feeling of like, hmm, maybe, maybe, maybe I won't be here very long, but I think I can do what maybe I've set out to do. At that point, my boss who was like 90% of the reason that I took that job tells me that she's moving on. And that's sort of when it feels like, Okay, this really has not worked out as I had planned. From there it started to have actually like a pretty negative impact on my mood. I was like, just working all day in my home office and watching Game of Thrones at night. I was sort of in a COVID lockdown before anyone was in a COVID lockdown. I'm just alone all day. And it was challenging. I ended up...

5:15fortunately quickly finding a new job, which is my job at Bloomberg opinion, where I have now been for four years and it's been a great fit and I'm very lucky. But I do remember that when that news became public, you know, the news that I would be leaving Barron to join Bloomberg, there was like a media industry publication that ran a headline like, you know, green Carmichael out at Barron's in less than a year.

5:37And I sort of was like, wow, I didn't know anyone was paying attention and this is awkward and that makes it sound really bad. So anyway, I think that like to go from that really wonderful goodbye party to green Carmichael out at Barron's in less than a year, really sort of put some perspective, I guess in my mind of like, wow, that didn't work out as I had hoped. It sort of rode off into the sunset and fell flat on my face. Well, to me, the important.

6:04thing to learn was not to ignore those red flags. Exactly. In hindsight, I realized like, you know, if you're going to make a big career decision, maybe give yourself more than one option, you know. Is that realistic? I mean, do a little networking. Yeah. Like how, how would it have potentially gone differently if I had come to you, Amy, and a more proactive way and saying, you know what, I really think given that I started at HBR when I was 25.

6:33And now I'm like looking into the future and wondering where am I going to be when I'm 40? Maybe we should have a bigger conversation about what else is out there. You know, instead of going off into my corner and being like, I think I need to leave. I don't want to tell any of my like mentors or tell anybody. I'm just going to kind of quietly hatch this plan by myself. You just snuck out the back door. And we're like, wait, come back. We have a goodbye party. But I hope you know that.

7:01there are people who would put you before any career or organization, right? That's so nice to hear, Amy. Thank you. I feel like I see that now, but I didn't know that at the time. Well, one of the things that occurs to me is that you were being driven by fear, right? The fear of having failed your colleagues by making the choice to leave. There was this idea that we would be disappointed or try to convince you otherwise, or that it was somehow a failure to even leave. And I think When I do have a failure, I often make the mistakes that lead to that failure out of fear of failing, right? Like it's this moment of like, I'm trying to protect against something. And so therefore I don't see the red flags. I don't make the right calls. My judgment is a little bit cloudy. Also though, I feel like...

7:57One of the things I learned from this is like, it's totally okay to pull the ripcord. Like when I was suddenly in that situation where I'm like, why am I working here? The person I came here to work with is gone. My days are isolated and weird and none of this makes sense. I was sort of was like, I'm pulling the ripcord. I'm not staying here to serve out my year. Maybe that's an outdated rule. And I feel like there is some strange strength that comes from like, yeah, you can make the wrong decision.

8:26it can go very badly. And then you actually can change your situation. And it's not easy. It might not be free. It could be very costly. But you can upend the apple cart if the situation calls for it. One of my failures was also a career move. And it was to a company where I just didn't understand my role. I didn't understand how I fit in, never felt like I'm going to smile at you because you know what company it is.

8:55I'm not going to say where I was, but I had a role of, you know, with editorial authority. I was making decisions about what would get published and what wouldn't get published. And I was working on a multi-part package and a colleague, a younger colleague, not his experience came to me and said, Hey, I have an idea. Why don't we, I saw this thing in the report that we're working with. Why don't we break that out and publish it? And I I kind of looked up with one eye and said, sure, sure, sure, sure, go ahead. And when it published, it was lawsuit material. And I did all of those things that you do when you realize that a bomb just went off, right? I thought, you know, not my fault. I wasn't the one who had this idea. And then, you know, nine seconds later, I thought, totally my fault. My colleague asked me, I own the responsibility for this.

9:54I should have known better. I should have paid attention. Of course, had I paid attention, I would never have said go ahead. I then marched over to the many people I reported up to and said, my fault. I am deeply embarrassed. I am sorry for the trouble this is causing and it caused a lot of trouble. And this is no one's fault but mine. And I don't know.

10:24what to do about this, help, how do I help make this better? And then I went home and drank a lot. Did you feel better having fessed up? Or boned up, I guess. I'm better so far away from what I was feeling at that time. I mean, at that point, I just really had to think about what is the right thing to do here, because I have to be able to live with myself. I love that.

10:54framing, like listening to Sarah's story and like, okay, pay attention to the red flags, pull the record when you need to. And one of the big things I'm taking away from what you're saying is once you recognize that failure, own it and act according to your values because that's one of the things that I think happens with failures is it challenges our identities as competent women. I mean, I think of you as someone with Excellent judgment. I have excellent judgment. I just didn't exercise it. I didn't pay attention. My crime was not paying attention. Yes, right. Not court judgment. Right. Yeah. I think there's sort of two things that I take from your harrowing story. I mean, I'm still having nightmares and I'll probably have one tonight. So thanks Amanda. I think the way that you described taking responsibility is one of the reasons people love working for you. It's because

11:47a different boss could have thrown that junior colleague right under the bus. And so the fact that you didn't do that, that you sort of looked your own card in the eye is a big deal. And I also think the way that you went to your then, the people higher than you in the hierarchy and said, how can I make this better? I'm sorry for my part in this. Like that is something that a lot of people don't do. They seek to sort of quickly shift the blame elsewhere or to minimize what they've done. That's really hard to do.

12:16Well, because you can't do fight or flight in that situation. And that's what every instinct in your being tells you to do. Yeah. And so not only are you owning up, you're exercising a key emotional intelligence skill of like emotional self-control, which is recognizing I feel terrible. But even though I feel terrible, I can't give into that. I can't do the things that would make that feel better immediately, which is to lie and pretend I didn't do this thing and someone else was more at fault.

12:44Amy may dispute this, but I think that one of the reasons you are from the outside able to walk in and take ownership of a mistake in that way is because at least from my perspective, there's not any doubts about your competence. And so clearly the situation you describe as an aberration. But I feel like a different person or maybe a person in a different place in their career might have a tougher time.

13:14having that conversation because they're worried like, oh, you know, my bosses are gonna think I'm completely incompetent or that they don't have credits to burn or their boss has unreasonably high expectations. Okay, but in the emotional scramble that followed, I wasn't able to take even a quarter step back to think about competence and reputation. All I could do was to think, how did this happen? How did I make such a bad call? And then I realized I never looked at the list.

13:44I never looked at this thing that is gonna get us in trouble and I didn't give it four seconds thought which is a terrible Flaw yeah, not paying attention when you're in charge of those details But can we talk about that too because I think that this is something that a lot of people feel especially women is that and I feel this more now that I'm a working mom I don't have attention for everything in life even important details sometimes and I forget things in ways that I used to never. And it's because I'm remembering so many more of them. Like probably on a given day, say before I had kids, I remembered 100 things. Now I'm remembering 150 things, but I'm also forgetting 20 things. And you are, Amy, are in like a senior leadership role where people probably come to you dozens of time a day asking, can I have a decision on this? Can I have a decision on that? Can you weigh in over here? So when one is stretched,

14:43to a point where simply keeping up requires an enormous amount of velocity. How do you make sure that you are paying attention to every single detail? You change the frame. So there are a couple things you do. And I did this because I never wanted, I will never make this mistake again. I'll make new- Make new mistakes. Horrific mistakes, but you know, don't be new. One thing is you ask yourself, does this really have to be done right this second? And you ask that of the person who sent you.

15:13I mean, sometimes people will send me articles at nine at night and say, hey, I need you to give this a read before work begins tomorrow. And I have said, I can't. I can't. I will do it by 10 a.m. And just I set a different boundary around it. But if your values are that you're going to do your job to the best of your ability all the time, then you have to make sure that you're enabling yourself to do that. So there's nothing wrong with saying, I can't get everything I thought I would get done done by close of business. So here are the things I'm going to put off till tomorrow. Send out a note saying, I know I promised this to you this afternoon. I can't get to it until tomorrow. You know, chances are nothing is going to happen, right? It's just resetting expectations. Don't let it just go into the void of silence because people make up their own stories and be responsible. I think about the failures other people have come to me with.

16:10And so many times it's, I was moving too fast. I was moving too fast. And I think that's, I think that's the real challenge is like, can you slow down? And I do have a little bit of a trick, especially at like three o'clock when I start getting decisions coming toward me, I get like really anxious and wound up and start overthinking. And I'm like, Oh, no, no, no. Okay. Like slow down. Can this wait till nine AM? Do I need a good night's sleep? And if it's a decision that has to be made, how do I bring in someone else to help me make a good judgment call? How do I slow down the process a little bit? How do I just really sort of lay out the pros and cons? Just monitoring my own energy and reaction in that moment can help me avoid that failure of moving too fast. Self-regulation.

16:58Yeah, I agree with you guys and I see the value of slowing down But one of the things I like about the way you're framing this is that it is a question of can this wait till tomorrow at 9 a.m Because sometimes it really can't yeah, and then it's like well, okay part of the value here is the speed itself right and a kind of 80% right or mediocre decision right now is worth twice as much as a Decision tomorrow, you know, right, but you have the discernment to make that call You know when no decision is worse than a suboptimal decision You know that at the outset the other thing you know is how to separate the urgent from the important Your urgency is your urgency. It's not everyone else's urgency So, you know not to let people impose their urgency on you, right?

17:49And that, that was a really hard lesson for me to learn because I wanted everyone to think well of me. Yeah. So I needed to make sure they were all happy because I was a service bureau, right? Yeah. We're not service bureaus. Yeah. So I want to hear Amy G's failure.

18:06So many came to mind but the one that really I always think about when I think about a moment where I just felt like oh I messed this up big time was when I was working for a management consulting firm and I was asked to put together a Proposal for a client including the pricing aspect and I had not done the pricing aspect before but I had been sort of shadowing my boss while he did it quite a few times and I wildly underestimated the cost, including the cost of a third-party vendor who we had to pay. So when it came time for us to build a client, my boss was like, wait, what? This is what we're building the client? I was like, yeah. And it was an order of magnitude off. So it meant we had to pay that third-party vendor. It meant we had to swallow the cost. It had a real implication. And I think...

19:03partly it being about numbers had messed with my head a little bit because I pride myself as someone who was good at math in my school days, but it's not something I gravitate toward. And I also understood there's some stereotypes that women aren't good at finances. I was trying to sort of counter that and that had made me really anxious. The other thing in retrospect, and this is actually just occurring to me as I'm talking, is that I think I also was really trying to please the client. And I think I came down to this lower number because I was like, they'll be so happy about this. And I don't think I knew how off I was. It was bad. It was bad. And I remember actually they did not let me price things for a while, which was fair. That was like a completely fair reaction. I mean, then I was so careful.

20:00just went over and over every single number once they allowed me to do it again to be sure I had it, right? And I probably aired the other way, which is to overestimate, which I learned actually was a better approach with consulting because then when you bill them less than what you had estimated, they're happy and you're still getting paid for the work you did. Yeah. Amy, as you're telling this story, It sounds like you were working on this pricing project almost alone. Like why didn't someone look over your shoulder and say, that doesn't seem right? Good question. And I'm not, I don't remember exactly whether like my boss, it might have been a situation where my boss was doing what Amy B did in her failure, which was like not checking closely enough, being like, oh, sure, sure. Amy's competent, like whatever, like she'll, she'll get it right. And I was overconfident in retrospect about my ability to do it. So I'm sure I projected that I did not need help.

20:53that I was like, oh yeah, I've seen him do the Sicilian poems, I've been on a similar project, I know how much that cost. I wish I could go back and remember exactly where the numbers got messy, but I didn't feel like I needed help. And then that was something I took into the next time I did a proposal was really asking for people. And my boss was at that point looking over my shoulder for sure, but I also was asking peers who were learning the same skill How are you doing this? What are you putting in for these numbers? How are you making the calculations? But it really wasn't a math error. I think it was a judgment error, which is what elevates it from a mistake to a failure, because of course it would have had consequences regardless. But if I could have just been like, oh, I switched these numbers, that would have been a very simple thing to sort of recover from. And one of the consequences also was that we couldn't really eat

21:52the cost completely. So my boss then had to go back to the client, explain what happened, admit I had made a mistake, right? And renegotiate and agree to sort of meet not in the middle, but we, the client was willing to give a little bit more than, and we had a price to that. That's awkward. Oh gosh. That sounds really painful. Yes. And then I had to work. I mean, it was an ongoing project. So I had to continue to work with them. Oh God.

22:17I'm hearing a sort of common thread between the two stories that you guys have shared, which is that people pleasing is the path to unhappiness. You know, you cannot give everyone quick answers all the time. You cannot give everyone a super low price all the time. That way lies failure and pain. The other failure that came to mind is sort of the opposite in that it was something I had done a zillion times. Like I had a speaking gig this summer.

22:45It's something I've done a bunch of times. So I just sort of started to cut corners a little bit. Like I didn't spend as much time prepping. I didn't find out enough about the organization. There were a couple snafus with timing and coordinating with the client. But I was like, oh, I've done this. It'll be fine. And then I got up on stage and within five minutes I was like, oh, this is not going well. Like just saw the like flat faces, the wrinkled brows of like what?

23:14What is she talking about? And I've been very lucky in my speaking work in that I've been getting amazing feedback the past few years. It feels like I really found something I'm good at and to have that just like moment where there was no turning back. I'm on a stage in front of hundreds of people. I know it's not going well. What do I do? You run, you just run. It did occur to me. I could just sit down and cry and this would all be over. Yeah, no.

23:42There's so many steps along the way that I now see where I was either cutting corners, not paying attention to red flags because there was some issues like about the agenda and where I showed up in the agenda that didn't make sense about how I was going to be introduced. I didn't even ask, oh, who's going to introduce me? Where's my clicker? I didn't like all those things that I had just sort of let slide because I thought I'd be able to wing it. I didn't. And the climb was unhappy.

24:10Fair enough. And it was the first time I really got the feedback of like, oh yeah, that didn't go well. And actually this was, this was how I knew in my gut it didn't go well, but you'd try to do the like, it was probably better than I thought. But what I knew was someone posted on LinkedIn later, there were three speakers at this event and they had put, you know, said to the first speaker like, you were amazing. You blew our minds.

24:35And there was, I can't remember what the second was. And then it was like, Amy Gala, it was interesting to hear you talk. Oh man. Oh no. Can you imagine? Oh, I was like, you were there too. And Amy Gala. Amy, you got the participation prize. I was like, oh no. It was bad. But you know, you learn from it. But can we just also, you give a lot of speeches, some of them are gonna bomb, you know?

25:04And sometimes I think we're so hard on ourselves and we're always looking for a lesson. How could I have avoided that? How could it have gone better? And it's sometimes it just doesn't work out.

25:14Yeah, you know, well, and it's it's so funny. I watch I've been watching all three of us do this is like when one of us tells the other we're like, it's okay. Like it happens. That's not the self-talk. No, right? There's no talk. Like, you know, there was part of me that tried to be like, it's okay. It's okay. But I remember texting my friend. I think that went really, really poorly. And she's a good friend because she was like, oh, yeah, what went wrong? Like she wasn't like, I'm sure it was better. She didn't do any of that because it's okay to just say I fail. Like.

25:43And I did like, yes, some are going to bomb, but they're not bombing because one out of 10, they're bombing because I didn't do the things I know to do. Yeah. I have a question and it's a slight shifting of gears. We mostly have talked about things where we can pinpoint a place that we failed. We have not really talked about a group failure where we were part of a bigger project and maybe it wasn't entirely our fault. And then like the thing.

26:10didn't work although maybe maybe yours there were like it sounds like there were maybe more no that was me but I have been part of a group project that I remember I came into this company and everyone said you know this is a 22 million dollar project it was a website and I remember looking at what they had so far and what they had so far with a blank page and a weird drawer that opened and closed I mean it made that sound 11 million for it to open and 11 million for it to close. And I kept saying, what's that for? And the developer responded, whatever you want. So I remember thinking, I just hopped on a train that's about to tumble off the tracks and into the ravine. That's how it felt. Yeah. So can we talk like, what do you do in that situation if you sense the impending failure coming and you're worried you can't?

27:03get the train onto the right track. Or then after the derailment, you know, the big bus comes in and says, why do we spend $22 million on that stupid drawer or whatever? Then there's all the finger pointing of the gang that can't shoot street. Like, how do you stop it from happening if you can? And how do you then respond to the situation? Well, in my case, there was no way I could stop it. I was just sort of brought on board mid-trip to stop this metaphor.

27:31You know, I don't know. What I did was I just told the truth. I just said, yeah, I never quite understood where all that money went. And yeah, by the time I got here, there was nothing I could do. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I, I don't think I've personally done, but I've seen others do when you're on the sort of sinking ship of a project is to say, oh, let's step back and remind ourselves what we're trying to achieve. Right. Right. And just like agree, because ideally you agree on a measure of success upfront, but let's be honest. How many times do we really do that? Or the measure is really meaningful. Right. And it's just to step back and say, okay, what are we trying to achieve? Are we achieving it?

28:15If we're not, what adjustments do we need to make? And, you know, there is that some cost fallacy. It's what prevents people from asking, you know, are we doing the right thing here? Is this really what we want to be putting out into the world? Yeah. Asking those questions that are just going to upend the entire project. That takes a lot of courage to ask those questions. It's also challenging though, because there are times when you have a team full of people Every few weeks someone asked that question. Yeah, and as a result the project Really moves very slowly or in a zigzagging fashion, but I think the other thing is to make sure it's clear We're getting credit or blame together right right because I think the reason so many things Just sort of go on and on and on is no one's willing to say this drawer is useless, right?

29:06because then it's like, well, who follows the developer? Is it the person who you took over? It's UX. It's engineering. Yeah. And there are a lot of reasons projects go off. The rails, it's back. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I do also think that usually the person who really bluntly points out what's wrong is not thanked for their contribution. No. Yeah.

29:27But at the same time, it's really valuable or to be the person who's like, you know what, the reason this is late is because Bertha keeps turning in her stuff late. Everyone else on the team is on time. And that Bertha, like she's late and disorganized and it's affecting all of us. And I think we're taught not to throw each other under the bus, but there are times when I do think accountability is important. There has to be some way to kind of be honest about those things too. But I cringe at that.

29:55I'm a fan of direct honest conversation. Even conflict. Help me make it more tactical, Amy. But I cringe at the like, Bertha's not handed in the thing because it, chances are it's not that Bertha's lazy, it's not that, right? There's some dynamic going on. Bertha's boss isn't allowing her to spend enough time on this. Maybe she doesn't actually know what the goal of the project is and she's just sort of doing her part willy-nilly, right? Who knows? And so I think there has to be sort of a collective discussion of what is happening and how do we get it back on track or what needs to change? And it can be okay to say, you know, birth things seem to be coming in late. Why is that? But there's rarely ever one point of failure. Exactly. Exactly. It's so much easier to think there is. Oh my gosh, it would be way easier if Bertha would just get her act together. Okay, wait. I have a question. Yeah. You said there's rarely one point of failure.

30:51But then in your own story, you were like, no, I was the point of failure. But that wasn't a project. That was. I think that we're very, we seem to be more comfortable blaming ourselves as a single point of failure than this fictional Bertha. And like, look, Bertha is a made up person. She's not a friend of mine. So like. Well, she isn't now. That's for sure. No, but that's a good point, Sarah, because like I think about the speaking gig that did not go so well. I want to own that. And then I also think about.

31:20the many other people who are involved who did not help to set me up for success. I also think that we're kind of trained not to assign fault but to extract lessons. How are we not going to make this mistake next time, right? Yeah. We're uncomfortable pointing fingers. And I'm kind of glad about that though. I wonder if maybe it also allows repeat offenders to continue offending. Well, or I think if you know why, Someone on the team keeps missing their deadlines. Maybe you're like, okay, this person needs to be managed differently We need to have with that person a daily stand up or we ask for a progress report or you know, whatever I feel like if we're too hesitant to point fingers then you never get to what the solution is. Yeah, yeah At least for me personally just airing what what I'm observing as going on can be so freeing from the anxiety

32:17The other thing when I'm on a team that's starting to fail is I feel personally responsible. Even if I'm not leading that team, I could be the smallest player on that team and I'm like, why can't I make this better? Why can't I save this? Instead of doing that, what if we were the truth tellers of this is not going well? There's this dynamic. I don't know exactly what it is, but something's going on and we need to talk about it. Yeah. And starting the conversation that begins with, can we all agree this is not going well?

32:45I want to ask you about that alignment because I think there are times when Either my standards have been higher than my managers and I feel like this is a huge failure and my boss is like no no no It's going really well. We're learning so much and I I think the flip side also though can be very threatening if your boss seems like their standards are unreasonably high and You're constantly falling short that can feel dangerous like I'm gonna lose my job. So I'm just wondering like if you're standards are not aligned with your boss. How do we deal with that? Yeah. It's a conflict question kind of. Yeah. It totally is a conflict. There's a conflict over what success looks like. Right. Yeah. I think that one of the mistakes is that we in all sort of workplace dynamics is this belief that we have to have a shared world view. Right. To move forward. Right. Right. We don't. We have to just agree to move forward. And sometimes you and your boss may not see eye to eye. And that's okay. As long as that's not happening.

33:44every single time. I think your question about like the unreasonably high standards from a boss and how do you do that? I think one of the things you have to unhook yourself from defining success or failure based on their standards because you will drive yourself up a wall trying to meet those standards and you'll hold yourself back from taking the risks you probably need to take in order to succeed. So you have to tell yourself, yes, okay, I will try to please her X number of times, but I also have to have my own standards and evaluate against that. And if your goal is to make no mistakes and just please your boss, if you have an exacting boss, you're setting yourself up to fail left, right, and center. I mean, you know, it's funny that you say that, Amy, because I went back to the episode, I think from 2018 about perfectionism as part of my preparation for this episode. And Alice Boyz.

34:40had a point that I actually don't think I understood five years ago in that episode, that was about not internalizing other people's standards. And I listened to it again and I was like, oh, sort of hearing that in a different way now. And I think it goes to that, that you don't want to internalize the unreasonable standards of other people. They're not your standards. You can figure out how to work in that environment while just creating a healthy little wall there between you and those standards, I think, I hope.

35:08A little bit of detachment. Yeah. Well, and I think that detachment also helps when others think you've failed and you haven't. You don't feel that same way is that that wall can be really helpful. Again, you don't have to have a shared worldview to move forward. Can we talk a little bit about recovering from failure? Yes, let's do it. Okay. Do you want to start Amy B? Well, these starts with scraping yourself off the floor.

35:37You know, I don't know I am no expert at the bouncing back thing although if I think back to the story I told about my big failure Where I published something I shouldn't have published I did it by just I know myself and I know that I can linger in the sort of the self-flagellation Portion of recovery for a long long time and recognizing that wouldn't help me and so I really focus on what I could do to make this problem go away. So working with our attorney, really articulating to myself what I'd learned from it. And honestly, this was where I just had to sort of fake it till I made it. I really had to act like it was all gonna be okay until I felt it was all gonna be okay. Yeah. That's interesting. And I think there are two aspects, important aspects to the recovery. One is

36:35redeveloping your confidence and then also recovering your reputation. For me, I think about this speaking issue of like, I needed to acknowledge that I played a part in this. Other people played a part as well. And I also had to like create systems. I actually made a checklist of the things I didn't do in that situation that I was like, I'm not going to skip these things next time. Yeah.

37:04And so I actually now have a system so that that won't happen again. And my next one was much better. So that was the sort of recovery for my own confidence and my own systems. But I also then had to really own up to the client for my part in it and apologize. There was risk in apologizing because it was admitting to the failure. And yet it felt like the right thing to do because I didn't want the client to think that I thought that was good work. And I didn't give a litany of excuses and just say, you know, I'm sorry. And she owned up to her part in it as well, which I think was really, it was helpful for us to both sort of recover from that moment. And I think it helped my reputation. I'm so glad to hear you say that about apologizing because I know it feels risky and it feels really hard.

37:58At the same time, it can be so refreshing if it's heartfelt and sincere and actually makes people want to work with you more, I think. And also, you know, you're talking about how refreshing it is, Sarah, but you know, the emotional gymnastics you have to go through to keep making excuses to yourself are so much more exhausting than the catharsis of apology.

38:23Well and think about it from the other person's point of view, too It's like what is more annoying than someone who's messing up and keeps sort of trying to weasel out of it. How do you trust that person? And it damages the trust. Yes, right? That's right Well, and that's an interesting frame because failure in a way is a breach of trust, right? I trusted you to do this and you didn't do it And so now you have to restore that trust and I think as we've mentioned earlier It's so much easier when you have a strong reputation right like that consulting underestimating the project, I did have credits to burn, right? I had done great on other things in my work with them. So it's a little harder when you feel like you're on thin ice. Yeah. The one point I wanted to make about balancing back is I think especially in business and management, the business and management thought leadership world, we talk a lot about resilience as like a personal characteristic, like it's sort of like grit or perseverance, but

39:22Actually, there's psychological research on resilience as a kind of group activity. Like, if you are a resilient person, you probably have thick ice. You are not on thin ice. You are on thick ice. You probably have maybe a supportive family. You have maybe some financial resources to help defray whatever the...

39:43financial costs of your failure. You have psychological resources because maybe you were raised in a loving home. And I don't think that we think about that enough. I think we talk a lot about sort of bouncing back as if you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. But I actually think that some things about, you know, your support network, your mentorship, your colleagues, actually even having things outside of work that bring you joy hobbies.

40:11friendships, relationships that give you meaning so that even if work is actually going really badly, you still have a strong sense of self. I think all these things also contribute to resilience and your ability to recover from failure. Yeah. I think about, do you guys know what a balance board is? It's sort of like, yeah, like a, almost like at the top of a skateboard on this like cylinder and you're trying to balance without the tipping. And we have one in my family, I had the reputation of being the worst at it.

40:40Really terrible. I could like we would time me. I couldn't be up on it for more than three seconds and I was determined this summer I was like I'm gonna figure this out and my daughter looked at me one time and said it's not about balancing It's about recovering from imbalance and that completely changed my perspective and I feel like in a way What we're talking about is not about whether you fail or not you are going to fail. It's about how you recover from the failure that determines how you're seen, how you're perceived, and how you feel about your own confidence. Yeah. Trying to avoid failure will only stunt your career growth. That's right. Also, you know what? You're going to feel bad. There's just no way around it. But in that bad feeling, there's also a lot of self-reflection, I hope. Yeah. I think about Kristin Neff's research on self-compassion. And there's like three pieces of it. One is acknowledging the feelings, exactly what you were just saying, Amy B, of like, I feel bad.

41:37I feel anxious about this. I feel embarrassed, whatever you feel. The second is acknowledging the humanity, right? I'm not the first person who failed at this. I certainly am not the last person who's going to fail at this. We all make mistakes. We all have failures. And then the third is talking to yourself in a kind way, like the way you might talk to your friend about the mistake they made. So instead of like, how could you do that? You're such an idiot of like, all right, like, what do you want to do next? Right? How do you want to recover from this?

42:07And I think recognizing that that bad feeling is a signal. It's a data point the universe is sending you. You feel bad because something needs to change. Yeah. That's our show. I'm Amy Gallo. And I'm Amy Bernstein. To keep rising in our careers, we've got to let go of unrealistically high standards for ourselves. That's one of the main messages from Alice Boyz in the 2018 episode that Sarah mentioned. Perfect is the enemy. The fiction has been far too much time and effort trying to avoid any mistakes. So they'll avoid making decisions, they'll avoid taking action. And a lot of that is because ruminating over mistakes is so psychologically painful. You can find that episode and get more of Alice's insights by scrolling in the podcast feed to season two, episode five. And if you've never scrolled that far back, you'll see a lot of quality stuff in our archive. Go over browse.

43:06HBR has more podcasts to help you manage yourself, your team, and your organization. Find them at hbr.org slash podcast or search HBR and Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Women at Work's editorial and production team is Amanda Cursey, Maureen Hoek, Tina Toby-Mac, Rob Eckhart, Erica Truxler, Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates. Rob and Maure compose the steam music.

43:34Thanks for listening. Email us anytime at women at work at hbr.org.