What both Tony Robbins and the Harvard Business Review agree on

Posted on May 31, 2018 by Mihai Muntean, One of Thousands of Business Coaches on Noomii.

I want to talk to you about failure. Yes, the failure most of us are instinctively afraid of, despite all the business books and management gurus that urge us to embrace it.

One of my most memorable failures took place while I was a student. In the summer between my third and fourth year of Law School, I applied for a job with a Big 4 company and, after a number of pre-screenings, I joined a group of about 40 innocent enthusiasts that went through an intensive two-week training program focus on accounting and taxes that was the next to final stage in a selection process that would end up with 12 job offers. The training program was peppered with exams and made for a competitive and challenging environment.

I hated every day of it. As a Law student I had not taken up Accounting and most of everything that was taught during this program was more or less Chinese to me (I had not taken up Chinese either). The curriculum was fairly advanced and focused on practicalities of what supposedly we already knew. Lost in a sea of Finance and Accounting students that noded sagely to the lecturers’ remarks, I dreaded the first exam as if it were a root canal work. I had the certainty that it will tell me what I already knew which was that I sucked at this and it was a bad idea to join this program. After years of being a diligent A-grade student the idea of an exam where I would fail was alien to me. I wanted badly to quit, but this idea was alien too, so in a bout of what then seemed to be irrational courage bordering on masochism, I went in the second day. I got a 5 out of 10. In my fixed mindset universe this was a big failure, but also the moment when I decided to try harder and learn more. I stayed on for the next day and then the next day toiling away and getting 5’s and 6’es and one miraculous 7 out of 10.

By my standards, overall, I failed. The grades were public and it was easy to see that I was in the bottom quartile of the class. However, much to my surprise, I received one of the 12 job offers. When I innocently asked why (being a good student all the way, I wanted explanations not results:-), the answer surprised me even more: it was not triggered by my actual grades, but by the progress I made from my starting point during the two weeks. It was the first time I saw somebody placing tremendous value on my progress, on my ability to further learn and not on what I already knew (and despite the subsequent developments of the firm, I confess to still have a certain fondness for the people that gave me the opportunity to learn this lesson).

I feel that in a business environment driven by targets and performance ratings, much in the same way in which a school is driven by grades, it is easy to miss both the feeling of progressing as well as the importance of having progressed. We always have a choice, yes, but something in our school-nurtured allegiance to absolute standards steals a bit of our conscious power of choosing to celebrate a progress even when the outcome was below the target or the best rating available. Such missed opportunities are shaping the wrong way both the culture and mindset we are creating around us. This is how we end up with low engagement scores or a perpetual struggle to create in our organisations a learning environment that never quite seems to take off despite our other best efforts. So this is a piece of writing to encourage you to look at and celebrate your progress beyond any absolute metric. And maybe put a bit of effort into turning your home and work environments in growth environments.

In his TED talk, Tony Robbins speaks with a conviction earned first-hand of the importance of our need to constantly grow. What keeps us happy in the long run, he says, well beyond the moment when the effect of incentives completely wears off, is our ability to make progress. In a very insightful Harvard Business Review article, Teresa Amabile talks of the most important driver of employee engagement: “Of all the things that can boost inner work life, the most important is making progress in meaningful work”.

Acknowledging and reflecting progress in the way we build our home, school or work environments, helps us, our kids and our work colleagues stay engaged, connect with others, and become independent, passionate contributors to our personal and business endeavours. How to do that? Here are three simple, if not always easy, ways. At home, Carol Dweck advises us to praise our children for effort, not intelligence. Don Wettrick, the high-school professor that successfully brought Sillicon Valley-style innovation to the American public educational system, advocates the benefits of grading on improvement. Finally, Teresa Amabile suggests that as managers we keep a daily progress checklist to help us build the habit of identifying and outlining the daily, small wins of our team. And if you find checklists too tedious, how about starting your team’s day with a simple question: “What can accomplish today that would take you one step closer to your goal?”