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Let’s Talk About Our Failures
When you feel like you have only yourself to blame, listen to this.
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Have you had something go wrong at work? Like really wrong? How much of it do you feel was your fault? And are you still trying to move past it?
The Amys and their former co-host Sarah Green Carmichael revisit times they majorly messed up, in hopes that you’ll feel better about your experiences with failure. We’re not talking about honest mistakes with simple solutions; we’re talking about larger problems that were difficult and costly to correct. They share what happened, how they recovered, and what they learned.
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AMY BERNSTEIN: I 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.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Well, can you tell us a little bit more about?
AMY BERNSTEIN: I’ll tell you about one.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: You’re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Amy Bernstein.
AMY GALLO: I’m Amy Gallo. We’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.
AMY BERNSTEIN: But we also know she is going to push us. She’s going to test our thinking.
AMY GALLO: And bring in research findings.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And build up to some a-ha moments.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh my God, no pressure guys. I’m so glad that when you thought of failure, you thought of me.
AMY BERNSTEIN: No, we just knew that you would bring the honesty, but you’d also bring the humanity.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I’ll do my best.
AMY GALLO: So, why are we revisiting the times something’s gone wrong, or we felt like it had, or someone told us it had? Failure is 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. Their unrealistic expectations, their non-existent or useless feedback, their underestimation of our competence causes so much stress and anxiety that we actually do sometimes underperform.
AMY BERNSTEIN: 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.
AMY GALLO: So, Sarah, not to put you on the spot, but feel free to go first.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yes, Sarah, tell us about your failures.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: 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.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. I like that distinction between mistake and failure because I can think about lots of mistakes I’ve made.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Every day.
AMY GALLO: Yes.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: 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, it was a series of mistakes that led to something that was unfixable.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And for me, my filter was, I should have known better. And that was the moment when I got that gut punch of recognition. I knew that was failure.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GALLO: Okay. Tell us about one.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: 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 to be a failure in that there were red flags that I overlooked and taking the wrong job is not something that is easily rectified. You can’t just hit update or refresh and reboot that.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It takes a while to get out of it. So, just to set the scene a little bit, if we go back in our minds to the fall of 2018, I’ve decided, after almost 12 years at HBR, it’s time to move on. I call up an old boss of mine who, at that point, was the Editor in Chief of Barron’s, and we proceed from there. I’m not shopping around for other jobs. I just call her, and we 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 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. It’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 get this feeling of, 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 90% of the reason that I took that job, tells me that she’s moving on. And that’s when it feels like, Okay, this really has not worked out as I had planned. From there, it started to have actually a pretty negative impact on my mood. I was just working all day in my home office and watching Game of Thrones at night. I was in a COVID lockdown before anyone was in a COVID lockdown. I’m just alone all day, and it was challenging. I ended up, fortunately, 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, the news that I would be leaving Barron’s to join Bloomberg, there was a media industry publication that ran a headline like “Green Carmichael Out at Barron’s in Less Than a Year.” I was like, Wow, I didn’t know anyone was paying attention. This is awkward, and that makes it sound really bad. So, anyway, I think that to go from that really wonderful goodbye party to “Green Carmichael Out at Barron’s in Less Than a Year,” really put some perspective, I guess, in my mind of like, Wow, that didn’t work out as I had hoped. I rode off into the sunset and fell flat on my face.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, to me, the important thing to learn was not to ignore those red flags.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Exactly. In hindsight, I realized if you’re going to make a big career decision, maybe give yourself more than one option.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Is that realistic?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I mean, do a little networking.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: How would it have potentially gone differently if I had come to you, Amy, Amys, in a more proactive way and saying, “You know what? I really think, given that I started at HBR when I was 25, and now I’m 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.” 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 mentors or tell anybody. I’m just going to quietly hatch this plan by myself.”
AMY GALLO: You just snuck out the back door.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I know.
AMY GALLO: And we were like, “Wait, come back. We have a goodbye party, and then you can sneak out the back door.”
AMY BERNSTEIN: But I hope you know that there are people who would put you before any career or organization. Right?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s so nice to hear, Amy. Thank you. I feel like I see that now-
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: … but I didn’t know that at the time.
AMY GALLO: 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.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: 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.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Also, though, I feel like one of the things I learned from this is it’s totally okay to pull the ripcord. 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. None of this makes sense. I was like, I’m pulling the ripcord. I’m not staying here to serve out my year.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Maybe that’s an outdated rule, and I feel like there is some strange strength that comes from, yeah, you can make the wrong decision, it 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.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: 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. I’m going to smile at you because you know what company it is. I’m not going to say where I was, but I had a role with editorial authority. I was making decisions about what would get published and what wouldn’t get published. I was working on a multi-part package, and a colleague, a younger colleague, not as experienced, came to me and said, “Hey, I have an idea. I saw this thing in the report that we’re working with. Why don’t we break that out and publish it?” And I 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, “Not my fault. I wasn’t the one who had this idea.” And then, nine seconds later, I thought, “Totally my fault. My colleague asked me. I own the responsibility for this. I 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 what to do about this. Help. How do I help make this better?”
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And then I went home and drank a lot.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Did you feel better having fessed up? Or owned up, I guess?
AMY BERNSTEIN: Better is 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.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Right.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right?
AMY GALLO: Yeah. I love that framing. Listening to Sarah’s story and, okay, pay attention to the red flags, pull the rip cord 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.
AMY BERNSTEIN: I have excellent judgment.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: I just didn’t exercise it.
AMY GALLO: Right.
AMY BERNSTEIN: I didn’t pay attention. My crime was not paying attention.
AMY GALLO: Yes, right. Not poor judgment.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. I think there’s sort of two things that I take from your harrowing story, Amy.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. I mean, I’m still having nightmares and I’ll probably have one tonight. So, thanks, Amanda.
AMY GALLO: I think the way that you described taking responsibility is one of the reasons people love working for you is because a different boss could have thrown that junior colleague right under the bus. And so, the fact that you didn’t do that, that you looked your own heart in the eye is a big deal. 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,” that is something that a lot of people don’t do. They seek to quickly shift the blame elsewhere or to minimize what they’ve done. That’s really hard to do.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, you can’t do fight or flight in that situation, and that’s what every instinct in your being tells you to do.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: And so, not only are you owning up, you’re exercising a key emotional intelligence skill of 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.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Amy 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 is 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 having that conversation because they’re worried, “Oh, my bosses are going to think I’m completely incompetent.”
AMY GALLO: Or they don’t have credits to burn, or their boss has unreasonably high expectations.
AMY BERNSTEIN: 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. I never looked at this thing that is going to get us in trouble, and I didn’t give it four seconds thought, which is a terrible flaw, not paying attention when you are in charge of those details.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. 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-
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Probably on a given day, say, before I had kids, I remembered a hundred things. Now, I’m remembering 150 things, but I’m also forgetting 20 things.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And you, Amy, are in 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 to a point where simply keeping up requires an enormous amount of velocity, how you make sure that you are paying attention to every single detail?
AMY BERNSTEIN: You change the frame. So, there are a couple of things you do, and I did this because I will never make this mistake again. I’ll make new-
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Make new mistakes, yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: … horrific mistakes, but they’ll 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 sends you. I 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.”
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Right.
AMY BERNSTEIN: “I can’t. I will do it by 10:00 AM.”
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And 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 until tomorrow.” Send out a note saying, I know I promised this to you this afternoon. I can’t get to it until tomorrow.” Chances are nothing’s going to happen, right? It’s just resetting expectations.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Don’t let it just go into the void of silence because people make up their own stories.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And be responsible.
AMY GALLO: I think about the failures other people have come to me with. And so many times, I was moving too fast.
AMY BERNSTEIN: I was moving too fast. Exactly.
AMY GALLO: I think that’s the real challenge is can you slow down? And I do have a little bit of a trick, especially at three o’clock when I start getting-
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: … decisions coming toward me. I get really anxious and wound up and start overthinking, and I’m like, “Oh, no, no, no. Okay, slow down. Can this wait till 9:00 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 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.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Self-regulation. Yeah.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: 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 9:00 AM because sometimes it really can.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And then, well, okay, part of the value here is the speed itself-
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: … and an 80% right or mediocre decision right now is worth twice as much as a decision tomorrow.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right. But you have the discernment-
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes.
AMY BERNSTEIN: … to make that call.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes.
AMY BERNSTEIN: You know when no decision is worse than a suboptimal decision.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes.
AMY BERNSTEIN: You know that at the outset. The other thing is how to separate the urgent from the important. Your urgency is your urgency. It’s not everyone else’s urgency.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So, not to let people impose their urgency on you. And that was a really hard lesson for me to learn because I wanted everyone to think well of me-
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So, I needed to make sure they were all happy because I was a service bureau, right?
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: We’re not service bureaus.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: So, I want to hear Amy G.’s failure.
AMY GALLO: Oh, so 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 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 bill the client, my boss was like, “Wait, what? This is what we’re billing 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, partly, 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 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 a completely fair reaction. And, I mean, then I was so careful, just 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 erred 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.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. Amy, as you’re telling this story, it sounds like you were working on this pricing project almost alone. Why didn’t someone look over your shoulder and say, “Hmm, that doesn’t seem right?”
AMY GALLO: That’s a good question. And I don’t remember exactly whether my boss, it might’ve been a situation where my boss was doing what Amy B did in her failure, which was not checking closely enough, being like, “Oh, sure, sure. Amy’s competent, whatever. 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, that I was like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve seen him do this a zillion times. I’ve been on a similar projects. 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 are 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’ve had consequences regardless. But if I could have just been like, “Oh, I switched these numbers,” hat would’ve been a very simple thing to recover from.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: And one of the consequences, also, was that we couldn’t really eat the cost completely. So, my boss then had to go back to the client, explain what happened, admit I had made a mistake, and renegotiate and agree to meet, not in the middle, but the client was willing to give a little bit more than we had priced it. That’s awkward.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh, gosh.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That sounds really painful.
AMY GALLO: Yes. And then, I had to work. I mean-
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: … it was an ongoing project, so I had to continue to work with them.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, god.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I’m hearing a common thread between the two stories that you guys have shared, which is that people pleasing is the path to unhappiness. You cannot give everyone quick answers all the time. You cannot give everyone a super low price all the time.
AMY GALLO: Right.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That way lies failure and pain.
AMY GALLO: The other failure that came to mind is the opposite in that it was something I had done a zillion times. I had a speaking gig this summer. It’s something I’ve done a bunch of times. So, I just started to cut corners a little bit. 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. Just saw the flat faces, the wrinkled brows of, “What 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 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?
AMY BERNSTEIN: You run. You just run.
AMY GALLO: It did occur to me.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: I could just sit down and cry and this would all be over.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, no.
AMY GALLO: But there’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 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?” All those things that I had just let slide because I thought I’d be able to wing it. I didn’t. And the climb was unhappy. Fair 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 how I knew in my gut it didn’t go well, but you try to do the, “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 said to the first speaker, “You were amazing. You blew our minds.” And was, I can’t remember what the second was. And then, it was like, “Amy Gallo, it was interesting to hear you talk.”
AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, man.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh, no.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Can you imagine?
AMY GALLO: Oh, I was like-
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You were there, too.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And Amy Gallo.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Amy, you got the participation prize.
AMY GALLO: I was like-
AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, no.
AMY GALLO: -oh, no. Yeah, it was bad. But you learn from it.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: But can we just also, you give a lot of speeches. Some of them are going to bomb.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And sometimes I think we’re so hard on ourselves, and we’re always looking for a lesson. How could I have avoided it? How could it have gone better? And sometimes it just doesn’t work out.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Well, and it’s so funny, I’ve been watching all three of us do this. When one of us tells the other, we’re like, “It’s okay. It happened.”
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It’s okay.
AMY GALLO: But that’s not the self-talk.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: No.
AMY BERNSTEIN: No.
AMY GALLO: Right? There’s no talk. 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?” 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 failed, and I did. Yes, some are going to bomb, but they’re not bombing because one out of 10, they’re bombing. They’re bombing because I didn’t do the things I know to do.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: 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 the thing didn’t work. Although, Amy B, maybe yours. It sounds like there were maybe more or other people involved.
AMY BERNSTEIN: No, that was me. But I have been part of a group project that I remember-
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: … I came into this company and everyone said, “This is a $22 million project.” It was a website. And I remember looking at what they had so far and what they had so far was a blank page and a weird drawer that opened and closed, and it made that sound. And this had-
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: $11 million for it to open, and $11 million for it to close.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And I kept saying, “What’s that for?” And the developer responded, “Whatever you want.” So, I remember thinking-
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh, my goodness.
AMY BERNSTEIN: … I just hopped on a train that’s about to tumble off the tracks and into the ravine. That’s how it felt.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, can we talk, what do you do in that situation if you sense the impending failure coming, and you’re worried you can’t get the train onto the right track? Or then, after the derailment, the big boss comes in and says, “Why did we spend $22 million on that stupid drawer or whatever? Then, there’s all the finger pointing of the gun that can’t shoot straight. How do you stop it from happening if you can? And how do you then respond to the situation?
AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, in my case, there was no way I could stop it.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: I was just brought onboard mid-trip. Stop this metaphor. But 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 by the time I got here, there was nothing I could do.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. One of the things that I don’t think I’ve personally done, but I’ve seen others do when you’re on the sinking ship of a project is to say, “Oh, let’s step back and remind ourselves what we’re trying to achieve.”
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
AMY GALLO: Right? And just agree, ideally you agree on a measure of success upfront. But let’s be honest, how many times do we really do that?
AMY BERNSTEIN: Or the measures really meaningful.
AMY GALLO: Right. And it’s just to step back and say, “Okay, what are we trying to achieve? Are we achieving it? If we’re not, what adjustments do we need to make?”
AMY BERNSTEIN: And there is that sunk cost fallacy. It’s what prevents people from asking, “Are we doing the right thing here? Is this really what we want to be putting out into the world?”
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Asking those questions that are just going to upend the entire project. That takes a lot of courage to ask those questions.
AMY GALLO: It’s also challenging, though, because there are times when you have a team full of people. Every few weeks, someone asks that question-
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: 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.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
AMY GALLO: Because I think the reason so many things just go on and on and on is no one’s willing to say, “This drawer is useless,” right? Because then it’s like, “Well, who’s at fault? Is it the developer? Is it the person who you took over for?”
AMY BERNSTEIN: It’s UX. It’s engineering.
AMY GALLO: Right.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, and there are a lot of reasons projects go off the rails. It’s back.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Oh, my goodness. I do also think that usually the person who really bluntly points out what’s wrong is not thanked for their contribution.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right. No.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: But 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, 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 be honest about those things, too.
AMY GALLO: But I cringe at that. I mean, I’m a fan of direct, honest conversation, even conflict.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: How you make it more tactical, Amy.
AMY GALLO: Right. But I cringe at Bertha’s not handing in the thing, because, chances are, it’s not that Bertha’s lazy.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: No.
AMY GALLO: It’s not that-
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: 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 doing her part willy-nilly, right? Who knows? And so, I think there has to be 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, “Bertha’s things seem to be coming in late.” Why is that?
AMY BERNSTEIN: But there’s rarely ever one point of failure.
AMY GALLO: Exactly, exactly. It’s so much easier to think there is.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, my gosh. It would be way easier. If Bertha would just get her act together.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Wait, wait, I have a question.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You said there’s rarely one point of failure. But then in your own story you were like, “No, I was the point of failure.”
AMY BERNSTEIN: But that wasn’t a project. That was-
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It wasn’t, I guess, but I think that we seem to be more comfortable blaming ourselves as a single point of failure than this fictional Bertha.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And look, Bertha is a made-up person. She’s not a friend of mine.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, she isn’t now. That’s for sure.
AMY GALLO: No, but that’s a good point, Sarah, because I think about the speaking gig that did not go so well. I want to own that. And then, I also think about the many other people who are involved who did not help to set me up for success.
AMY BERNSTEIN: I also think that we’re trained not to assign fault, but to extract lessons. How are we not going to make this mistake next time? Right?
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: We’re uncomfortable pointing fingers. And I’m glad about that, though I wonder if maybe it also allows repeat offenders to continue offending.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: 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 standup, or we ask for a progress report,” or whatever. I feel like if we’re too hesitant to point fingers, then you never get to what the solution is.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Yeah. At least for me, personally, just airing what I’m observing as going on can be so freeing from the anxiety. The 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.” Right?
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
AMY GALLO: There’s this dynamic. I don’t know exactly what it is, but something’s going on and we need to talk about it.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah. And starting the conversation that begins with, “Can we all agree this is not going well?” And moving up from there.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I 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 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. “I’m going to lose my job.” So, I’m just wondering if your standards are not aligned with your boss, how do we deal with that?
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It’s a conflict question.
AMY GALLO: Yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, it totally is a conflict.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It’s a conflict over what success looks like.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, right. Yeah.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. I think that one of the mistakes is, in all workplace dynamics, is this belief that we have to have a shared worldview-
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
AMY GALLO: … to move forward.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
AMY GALLO: Right? 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 every single time. I think your question about 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.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, gosh.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I mean, it’s funny 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-
AMY GALLO: That’s a good episode.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: … Alice Boyes had 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.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And I listened to it again, and I was like, Oh-
AMY BERNSTEIN: That’s what she meant.
AMY GALLO: That’s right.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: -I’m hearing that in a different way now. And I think it goes to that you don’t want to internalize the unreasonable standards of other people.
AMY GALLO: Yeah, yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: 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.
AMY GALLO: That’s right.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I hope. A little bit of detachment.
AMY GALLO: 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. That wall can be really helpful. Again, you don’t have to have a shared worldview to move forward.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Can we talk a little bit about recovering from failure?
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yes. Let’s do it. Yeah.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Okay. Do you want to start Amy B.?
AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, it starts with scraping yourself off the floor. 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 self-flagellation portion of recovery for a long, long time, and recognizing that wouldn’t help me. And so, I really focused 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 fake it till I made it. I really had to act like it was all going to be okay until I felt it was all going to be okay.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: That’s interesting. And I think there are two aspects, important aspects, to the recovery. One is redeveloping your confidence. And then, also, recovering your reputation. For me, I think about this speaking gig issue of I needed to acknowledge that I played a part in this, other people played a part, as well, and I also had to 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.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: And so, I actually now have a system so that won’t happen again. And my next one was much better. So, that was the 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.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Right.
AMY GALLO: And I didn’t give a litany of excuses, and just say sorry. And she owned up to her part in it, as well, which I think it was helpful for us to both recover from that moment. And I think it helped my reputation.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I’m so glad to hear you say that about apologizing, because I know it feels risky, and it feels really hard. At 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.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And also, you’re talking about how refreshing it is, Sarah. But the emotional gymnastics you have to go through to keep making excuses to yourself are so much more exhausting than the catharsis of apology.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, and think about it from the other person’s point of view too. What is more annoying than someone who’s messing up and keeps trying to weasel out of it?
AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, how do you trust that person?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It’s so frustrating. Well, yeah.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And it damages the trust, right?
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah.
AMY GALLO: 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, 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.
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. The one point I wanted to make about bouncing back is I think, especially in business and management, the business and management thought leadership world, we talk a lot about resilience as a personal characteristic. It’s like grit or perseverance, but actually there’s psychological research on resilience as a 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 financial 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 bouncing back as if you have to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. But I actually think that some things about your support network, your mentorship, your colleagues, actually even having things outside of work that bring you joy, hobbies, friendships, 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 in your ability to recover from failure.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. I’m thinking about, do you guys know what a balance board is?
AMY BERNSTEIN: Yes, yes.
AMY GALLO: It’s almost like at the top of a skateboard on this cylinder and you’re trying to balance without it tipping. And we have one. And in my family, I had the reputation of being the worst at it. Really terrible. 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 going to 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, Amy, 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. T
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yeah. Trying to avoid failure will only stunt your career growth.
AMY GALLO: That’s right.
AMY BERNSTEIN: 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.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. Yeah. I think about Kristen Neff’s research on self-compassion, and there’s three pieces of it. One is acknowledging the feelings. Exactly what you were just saying, Amy B., of like, “I feel bad. I 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 the way you might talk to your friend about the mistake they made. So, instead of “How could you do that? You’re such an idiot.” Be like, “All right, what do you want to do next? How do you want to recover from this?”
SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And 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.
AMY GALLO: Yeah. That’s our show. I’m Amy Gallo.
AMY BERNSTEIN: 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 Boyes in the 2018 episode that Sarah mentioned, Perfect is the Enemy.
ALICE BOYES: Perfectionists spend 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.
AMY GALLO: You can find that episode and get more of Alice’s insights by scrolling in the podcast feed to season two, episode five.
AMY BERNSTEIN: And if you’ve never scrolled that far back, you’ll see a lot of quality stuff in our archive. Go have a browse.
AMY GALLO: HBR has more podcasts to help you manage yourself, your team, and your organization. Find them at hbr.org/podcast or search HBR and Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
AMY BERNSTEIN: Women at Work’s editorial and production team is Amanda Kersey, Maureen Hoch, Tina Tobey Mack, Rob Eckhardt, Erica Truxler, Ian Fox, and Hannah Bates. Robin Moore composed the theme music.
AMY GALLO: Thanks for listening. Email us anytime at womenatwork@hbr.org.