Teaching Yourself New Ideas & New Skills

When is the last time you taught yourself a new skill or body of knowledge?  How did it make you feel?  During the process, you probably felt mighty uncomfortable, perhaps even stressed out.  Few of us enjoy making mistakes, struggling to understand a concept, or failing to master a new skill.  When we have achieved mastery, though, we usually feel extremely good about ourselves.  More importantly, we may have cultivated a new skill that helps us thrive in our careers.  

Writing in Psychology Today, Carlin Flora explains, "To survive in the knowledge economy, we must all become self-taught learners, whatever our formal training was or will be."  Flora explains some of the benefits of teaching ourselves: "The rewards of becoming an autodidact, though, include igniting inner fires, making new connections to knowledge and skills you already have, advancing in your career, meeting kindred spirits, and cultivating an overall zest for life and its riches."

Being self-taught doesn't mean we don't attend workshops, watch YouTube tutorials, or listen to experts at a conference.  However, it does mean organizing our own learning journey, and not relying solely on the passive process of listening to others explain something to us. We have to read voraciously, find opportunities to practice new skills, and experiment with new methods and techniques. 

I must admit that I don't love being a novice at something. Author James Marcus Bach explains that, for many people, "feelings of inadequacy stop curiosity." Yet, curiosity is at the heart of learning.  While teachers hopefully fostered our curiosity as students, we need to cultivate our own curiosity as adult learners.  We need to take the time to ask interesting questions, acknowledge what we don't know, and seek out sources of new information.  In many cases, we won't truly learn something new in a 60-second video.  It will take sustained attention and the reduction of distraction.  Finding the time to focus will be key if we wish to become more proficient at teaching ourselves something new.  

A Genuine Apology Goes a Long Way

Ben Cohen reports today in the Wall Street Journal about a remarkable apology email issued by Andrew Benin, chief executive of Graza, a startup that sells squeezable bottles of extra-virgin olive oil.  Unfortunately, the company did not cope effectively with high customer demand during the holidays.  Many people received their packages late, and some packages were damaged.  Customers complained of leaking olive oil bottles.  Cohen drafted a detailed apology and sent it to over 35,000 Graza customers.  Cohen described the rather unconventional email:

The mea culpa from a one-year-old company with the subject line “Learning from our mistakes” was just about the opposite of a typical corporate response. It explained in plain English and candid detail what went wrong and why. It took accountability for those errors and offered a discount on future orders. It was raw, transparent about uncertainty and messy with typos and misspellings. It was also oddly entertaining and strangely charming.

You can read the entire email for yourself if you view Cohen's article on the Wall Street Journal website.  Like Cohen, I found the apology very genuine and sincere, and it didn't feel as robotic as many corporate apology emails do (I could do without the spelling and grammatical errors though. I am a professor after all).  In Cohen's article, he cites author Marjorie Ingall's advice for issuing apologies.  

1. Say you’re sorry.

2. For what you did.

3. Show you understand why it was bad.

4. Only explain if you need to; don’t make excuses.

5. Say why it won’t happen again.

6. Offer to make up for it.

The six recommendations seems sensible.  However, the real reason for the effectiveness of the Graza email seems to be in the tone, not just the content itself.  You can do the six things above, and yet you may still write a robotic email that sounds inauthentic.  Did this email work? Well, 867 people actually replied to the email, many quite positively. One said, “Thanks for your honesty. I wish more businesses did the same.”

What Builds Trust in Organizations?

Source: www.openaccessgovernment.org

PwC has recently conducted an extensive research study on the topic of trust in organizations.  They asked consumers, employees, and executives about the factors that enhance trust in a business.  Among consumers and employees, the top three factors that build trust were:

1.  Accountable to customers and employees

2.  Clear communications

3.  Admits to mistakes

I found #3 particularly interesting, and of course, it relates directly to the top item in the survey responses (accountability).  Every organization will make mistakes.  How does that firm respond in those situations? Do they own the mistakes, apologize to customers and/or employees, and work diligently and transparently to rectify the situation?  All too often, executives don't own up to mistakes in a timely fashion, if at all.  Or, they try to blame external conditions or uncontrollable factors for lower-than-expected performance.   Customers and employees see right through such unsatisfactory explanations.  Employees also come to believe that a double standard exists.  They are held accountable for errors, but executives are not.  Leaders need to create a safe environment where everyone, including the people at the top, can talk candidly about errors so that learning and improvement can take place.  

Etsy Engineers Share Their Failures in Company-Wide Memos

Many organizations exhibit of culture of blame and shame when it comes to failures.  In a case study that I co-wrote with Amy Edmondson years ago, a doctor described the "ABCs of medicine" - in the past, he said, health care practitioners and administrators tended to Accuse, Blame, and Criticize when it came to medical accidents and mistakes.  Yesterday, I read a fascinating article about one firm's attempt to transform its attitude toward failure.  Etsy has tried to create a culture that encourages people to acknowledge, discuss, and learn from failures.   Here is an excerpt from the  article posted on Quartz: 

In a conversation yesterday (Sept. 17) with Quartz editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney, Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson revealed that people at the company are encouraged to document their mistakes and how they happened, in public emails.  “It’s called a PSA and people will send out an email to the company or a list of people saying I made this mistake, here’s how I made that mistake, don’t you make this mistake,” Dickerson said. “So that’s proactive and I think really demonstrates that the culture is self perpetuating.”  He was referring to the company’s efforts at practicing a “just culture,” based on the idea that blamelessness makes people more accountable, and more willing to admit mistakes.As described by Etsy CTO John Allspaw in an Etsy blog post, engineers (and now others at the company) who mess up are given the opportunity to give a detailed account of what they did, the effects they had, their expectations and assumptions, and what they think happened. And, crucially, they can give that account without any fear of punishment or retribution, in what’s called “a blameless post-mortem.”

I love this technique!   Etsy has done something quite remarkable here.  They are not simply demonstrating tolerance for failure.  They are not simply avoiding the tendency to point fingers when failures occur.  Etsy has gone one step further with this practice.  They are encouraging serious self-reflection on the part of their people.   The employees do  more than admit a mistake in these PSA e-mails.  They describe what happened and they analyze why events did not transpire as they had hoped or expected.  The review and analysis provides the opportunity for improvement, not only for themselves, but for others throughout the organization who read these PSAs.   

Going Public With Your Mistakes: The Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston

Imagine a hospital that discusses its mistakes publicly.   Does that sound like a good idea?  Could it help advance the cause of patient safety.  Yesterday we learned that scholars at Johns Hopkins have conducted research demonstrating that medical errors are the third leading cause of death in the United States.   That's alarming in its own right, but especially so since many hospitals have been  trying to reduce medical accidents over the past decade.   

The Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston has been trying to reduce errors, and now they have taken their efforts one step further.   They have decided to go public with a safety blog that they have been publishing internally for several years. I applaud their courageous decision. Karen Fiumara, senior director of patient safety at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, explains the decision to go public about the hospital's mistakes.  

Hospitals celebrate their safety records, but rarely discuss their mistakes. Yet it’s difficult, if not impossible, to improve safety without identifying and learning from errors. That’s why Brigham and Women’s Hospital has launched Safety Matters. This blog aims to describe mistakes made at the hospital along with steps the hospital is taking to prevent them in the future.  We began Safety Matters in 2011. At the time, it was an internal communication available only to Brigham and Women’s employees via the hospital’s intranet. One goal is to make sure that everyone on the staff knows that the hospital is committed to being open and transparent about mistakes and learning from them. Another goal is to convey that reporting mistakes is not only encouraged, but is also the right thing to do.  Another element of some blog entries is the “Just Culture Corner.” It helps promote a culture in which hospital staff and patients feel safe and supported when speaking up about mistakes and risks.

Safety Matters went public in January 2016. We did this for several reasons:

• It’s now more accessible to the entire staff, and can be read from home or a mobile device.
• It demonstrates to patients, prospective patients, and other stakeholders that the hospital is committed to transparency and continuous improvement.
• It can be a resource for other hospitals in the United States and around the world to provide safer patient care.

Five Classic Competitive Strategy Mistakes

Based on my experience, here are five business strategy mistakes that organizations often make:

1.  Focusing on market share extensively, while not thinking enough about how to drive product category growth - as a result, they miss chances to grow the pie for all

 2.  Paying too little attention to a maturing core business while focusing effort on growth into new markets, resulting in further erosion of the core

3.  Overestimating economies of scale and scope - and forgetting that diseconomies of scale and scope can become substantial

4.  Benchmarking rivals and then imitating one particular activity or capability, while not realizing that the rival's competitive advantage comes from how that activity fits tightly into a broader, integrated system of activities

5.  Resorting prematurely to price as a competitive weapon - not being creative enough to think about other ways to attract customers, deepen their relationship with existing customers, and grow an entire category

Two Kinds of Questions: Which Do You Ask?

Stanford's Bill Barnett has a terrific blog post about the two types of questions that people tend to ask.   The "showing off" question aims to demonstrate how much we know about a subject.  It might be a "gotcha" aiming to expose the weakness or mistake in a presenter's argument.  The second type of question aims to learn, not to show off.  This question comes from a willingness to be a bit vulnerable, to acknowledge ignorance or a lack of a complete understanding about a subject.  This "learning" question aims not to demonstrate our existing knowledge to others, but instead to deepen our understanding about a particular topic.  Barnett points out that we often fail to ask these "learning" questions because we don't want to look stupid.  We are afraid to acknowledge in front of our peers, subordinates, or superiors that we do not understand a topic completely.   Unfortunately, we limit ourselves when we hold back in such a fashion.  

What type of questions do you ask as a leader?   Moreover, what type of questions do you encourage your team members to ask?  Here are a few clues that someone might be asking a "showing off" question rather than a learning one.  First, do you hear a long preamble before the actual question (or is there actually no question in there at all!)?  Second, does the person's agenda shine through when they ask the question?  Third, what's the person's body language like?   Are they in attack mode in their posture, as well as their words?   Finally, is it a leading question?  Are they clearly fishing for a particular answer?  

Do You Have a Mistake Diary?

The Wall Street Journal reports on an interesting new leadership phenomenon.  According to this article by
Rachel Silverman, "Some self-aware managers are trying out “mistake diaries” or “failure reports” to help minimize the chances that a problem happens twice – and to help foster an environment where it’s OK to try and fail."  

Silverman describes the efforts of Meebo co-founder Elaine Wherry, who has kept a mistake diary for a number of years.   Silverman writes that, "Using a series of sketchbooks, she started taking notes and making drawings to record her mistakes – such as time-management problems and hyper-perfectionism — as a personal way to remember them."   Wherry has even shared her "most common blunders" with her staff, since she noticed many young new employees making many of the mistakes that she had made earlier in her career.  (Take a look at a video created by Elaine Wherry by clicking here). 

Everyone should note the importance of reflection as a tool for improving as a leader.   We can't just focus on what's next, on the newest pressing problem.  We have to find a way to carve out some time for reflection if we are to improve and develop.   Of course, finding that time can be difficult in hectic schedules that many leaders keep.  So, before thinking about crafting a mistake diary, you have to take a hard look at your schedule.  Blocking out some time for reflection is hard, but necessary, if we are to identify and learn from our mistakes. 

Amazon Apologizes for Lady Gaga Error

Amazon moved quickly this week to rectify the problem that hindered customers from taking advantage of a terrific deal on the new Lady Gaga album.   On Monday, when Amazon offered Lady Gaga's new album for only 99 cents, customers rushed to download it.  The incredible demand overwhelmed Amazon's systems.  To their credit, Amazon apologized for the error, fixed the problem, and then brought the offer back to its customers on Thursday.   The company deserves credit for learning from its less effective response to its cloud service difficulties just a few weeks ago, when it was slow to acknowledge the problem and apologize to customers.  

The story offers a few key lessons for managers. First, learning from your stumbles and translating that learning into immediate improvement can have a powerful positive effect.  In addition, when you do make a mistake, you have to do three things.  First, you have to acknowledge your error publicly.  Second, you have to fix the problem.  Finally, you have to remedy the situation with your customers when you are sure that you are able to serve them effectively.    Too many companies either are too slow to admit their mistakes, or they rush to make it up to customers when they still aren't ready to offer an exceptional service experience.  Amazon took a couple days to get the problem ironed out before coming back to its customers with the deal on Thursday.