Why Managers Should
Reveal Their Failures
If you want to get your messages through to
employees, be ready to confess your own management shortcomings,
counsels Alison Wood Brooks.
If you’re a business leader who oozes
achievement, sprints up the corporate ladder, and earns big bucks, your
co-workers probably resent you to some extent. New research says high-achievers
can win over their colleagues with a simple approach: by sharing the failures
they encountered on the path to success.
“If you’re highly successful, your
achievements are obvious. It’s more novel and inspiring for others to learn
about your mistakes,” says Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Alison
Wood Brooks.
“What’s exciting about this research is that
we’re trying to chip away at the resentment that comes with envy and move
people toward admiration instead,” she says. “One way to do that is to
acknowledge your struggles or shortcomings.”
Brooks co-wrote the February 2018 working
paper, Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why
Successful People Should Reveal Their Failures,
with HBS doctoral students Karen Huang and Nicole Abi-Esber and professors Ryan
W. Buell, Brian Hall, and Laura Huang.
Confessing our setbacks is counterintuitive;
we tend to talk up achievements and hide failures. But successful leaders who
only crow about achievements can come across as egotistical showoffs, stirring
up “malicious envy” in their peers.
Malicious envy is a destructive emotion that
makes people feel inferior by comparison, even to the point of wishing they
could tear down the successful person. As prior research has shown, this type
of envy can be toxic in the workplace, stifling worker productivity, leading employees
to behave less cooperatively, interfering with group cohesion, and making
people feel more justified in behaving unethically.
“When people feel malicious envy, they engage
in counterproductive work to harm other people,” Brooks says. “They tend to
undermine others and try to slow them down.”
Revealing
failures won’t tarnish your image
The HBS team set out to test for levels of
malicious envy in different settings and to figure out strategies for tamping
it down. In one online study, participants were asked to read a biography by a
fictitious peer who had achieved professional success, for example by landing a
prestigious, lucrative job. People who read only about the person’s
achievements felt significantly more malicious envy than others who read a few
extra lines describing the person’s professional failures.
The results of two similar online studies
also yielded an important insight for successful people who share their
failures: Colleagues have no less admiration for a leader’s accomplishments if
they know about these failures, nor does it affect their perception of the
person’s status.
“Even after revealing their struggles or
failures, high achievers still look good,” Brooks says.
She cautioned that this effect works only for
people who have reached at least moderate success. “If you’re a low-status
intern, for example, you don’t need to talk as freely about your failures—not
because it’s harmful—but because people don’t tend to feel envious of you in
the first place.”
In another experiment, the researchers
studied a different environment: a competition in which entrepreneurs vying for
startup funding pitch their projects to potential investors. (The idea was to
determine the effects of envy in a field setting, not whether those feelings
affected the chances of winning funding.)
Some entrepreneurs listened to what they
thought was an audio recording of a fellow competitor’s pitch where the person
gushed only about her successes: “I have already landed some huge
clients—companies like Google and GE. I’ve had amazing success, and in the past
year I have single-handedly increased our market share by 200 percent.”
Meanwhile, others listened to a pitch where
the entrepreneur also fessed up to facing roadblocks by adding, “I wasn’t
always so successful. I had a lot of trouble getting to where I am now … When I
started my company … I also failed to demonstrate why potential clients should
believe in me and our mission. Many potential clients turned me down.”
The study results suggest that listeners jump
to different conclusions about a leader depending on whether the person shares
slipups or not. Listeners who heard the entrepreneur talk only about her
achievements automatically attributed the person’s success to talent alone, and
that seemed to make them feel badly about themselves by comparison. They also
saw this speaker as arrogant, filled with “hubristic pride,” which turned them
off.
On the other hand, participants who heard the
entrepreneur disclose previous failures believed the person had more “authentic
pride” and came across as confident rather than arrogant. They also got the
impression that this entrepreneur put a lot of effort into overcoming
obstacles, and that made them feel less malicious envy and more “benign envy.”
Benign envy brought out warmer, fuzzier feelings, with listeners not only
believing the entrepreneur was deserving of success, but also feeling motivated
to improve their own performance.
How
to share your faults
The research puts more credence behind
interpersonal emotion regulation—when one person deliberately shapes another
person’s emotional reactions during a social interaction.
We can have a lot of control over how other
people feel and react to us, says Brooks. “Some people might be uncomfortable
about exerting that control strategically because it might seem manipulative.
But the counterargument to that is that we do it all the time.”
For example, when we choose to be polite or
rude, or to give someone else compliments or not, it’s all interpersonal
regulation. “If we’re doing these things anyway, why not do it in ways that are
wise, productive, and kind?”
Managers can be particularly easy targets of
envy, especially when they move quickly through fast-track promotion programs
and their colleagues don’t. So, in discussing a promotion or a work-related
reward, a manager might consider tossing in a setback encountered earlier in
the person’s career to appear more confident and credible, rather than
self-centered.
Other workers can relate to facing obstacles,
so hearing about the successful manager’s missteps can not only decrease
internal competition among colleagues, but motivate other employees to strive
for success themselves. Also, in group meetings, managers could consider
“humanizing” members of the team by encouraging people to share their mistakes
as a team-building exercise to improve communication and collaboration.
“You can motivate your team to work harder by
doing this,” Brooks says. “I know I have felt that way seeing other women who
have succeeded. I want to know their tricks, how they navigated the minefields,
and what mistakes they made along the way—that will help me avoid those same
mistakes.”
The
humble job applicant
This strategy works for job-seekers, too. If
you’re asked to describe your greatest weakness in an interview, don’t use the
obvious “I work too hard” response. Instead, sincerely relate a mess up and
what you learned. “It’s a great opportunity to show your honesty and
vulnerability,” Brooks says.
The master of the public failure strategy
might be Princeton University psychology professor Johannes Haushofer has laundry list of defeats included degree programs he didn’t get into,
research funding he didn’t earn, and papers that were rejected by academic
journals.
“Most of what I try fails, but these failures
are often invisible, while the successes are visible,” Haushofer wrote on his
CV. “I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most
things work out for me. As a result, they are more likely to attribute their
own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic,
applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad
days.”
The CV earned plenty of press attention and
applause from fellow professionals, which doesn’t surprise Brooks.
“People find you more humble and likable when
you not only reveal your successes and accomplishments, but your struggles and
shortcomings, too,” she says. “If we want to see positive workplace outcomes,
we shouldn’t underestimate how important it is to be seen as humble, grounded,
and well-liked.”
|by Dina Gerdeman
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-managers-should-publicize-their-failures?cid=spmailing-23747519-WK%20Newsletter%2012-5-2018%20(1)-December%2005,%202018
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