Few of our failures are fatal.  ~Tim Harford, economist and Financial Times columnist

The idea of failing in order to succeed was illustrated to me by a friend who recently described a mutual friend’s approach to photography.  This mutual friend simply takes tons of photos.  She had posted a photo on Facebook of a blood moon that was quite stunning.  Well, I learned that she had taken 80 photos in order to get that one really great photo.  I consider photography a hobby.   While I completely understand and appreciate the need to fail, over and over, in order to take really great photos, I struggle with that same philosophy in my professional life.

Our society hasn’t really supported a “fail in order to succeed” culture.  Think about our educational system.  Typically (I won’t go so far as to say always), we turn in assignments, are told what we did wrong, and move on to the next assignment.  We don’t provide the opportunity to “keep trying” until we get it right.  We don’t teach children that failure is part of the process to succeed.  We teach them that it’s bad and to be avoided.

Sarah Rapp, interviewed Tim Harford to better understand the lessons of failure in his book, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure.

Rapp reports that, “at the crux of Adapt lies this conviction:  In a complex world, we must use an adaptive, experimental approach to succeed.”   That’s not exactly what our educational system or most organizations encourage.

To help us out, Harford outlines three principles for failing productively as reported by Rapp.  “You have to cast a wide net, ‘practice failing’ in a safe space, and be primed to let go of your idea if you’ve missed the mark.”  Harford says we should:

Try new things.  “Expose yourself to lots of different ideas and try lots of different approaches, on the grounds that failure is common.”

Experiment where failure is survivable.  “Look for experimental approaches where there’s a lot to learn – projects with small downsides but bigger upsides.  Too often we take on projects where the cost of failure is prohibitive, and just hope for the best.”

Recognize when you haven’t succeeded.  “The third principle is the easiest to state and the hardest to stick to: know when you’ve failed.”

One of the great “success” stories of the 20^th century was Apple and Steve Jobs.  I read that Steve said that at least half of Apple’s ideas didn’t work. But he encouraged lots of failure because he believed that failure was the path to success.

I’ll end this post with how it began.  Have you failed enough to succeed?

To those who think consistent civility is an extravagance: Just one habitually offensive employee critically positioned in your organization can cost you dearly in lost employees, lost customers, and lost productivity.  ~Christine Porath and Christine Pearson

I receive a newsletter called Inside Higher Ed and a recent issue reported findings of a survey of Chief Academic Officers that I found surprising.  Almost three-quarters of CAO’s (71%) are very or somewhat concerned about declining civility among faculty.  CAOs indicate that professors are likelier to treat students civilly than they are to treat their faculty peers or administrators that way.  More than 8 in 10 (83 percent) agree or strongly agree that civility should be a criteria for evaluating performance.

What surprised me is that college faculty really should be examples of leadership, I think.  So I did a little more investigating and the statistics only got worse.  I came across an article from HBR in January 2013 where authors Porath and Pearson said, “Rudeness at work is rampant, and it’s on the rise.  Over the past 14 years we’ve polled thousands of workers about how they’re treated on the job, and 98% have reported experiencing uncivil behavior.  In 2011 half said they were treated rudely at least once a week—up from a quarter in 1998.”

Porath and Pearson also found that among workers who’ve been on the receiving end of incivility:

• 48% intentionally decreased their work effort.
• 47% intentionally decreased the time spent at work.
• 38% intentionally decreased the quality of their work.
• 25% admitted to taking their frustration out on customers.

So last week, while conducting a training session on conflict resolution, I shared these statistics.  The group I worked with said they thought the statistics were quite believable, and began to describe to me the kind of incivility they both see and experience at their organization.

Here’s another example of just how uncivil we’ve all become.  Ochsner Health System, a large Louisiana health care provider, has adopted what it calls “the 10/5 way.”  If you’re within 10 feet of someone, make eye contact and smile.  If you’re within five feet, say hello.  Ochsner has seen greater patient satisfaction and an increase in patient referrals as a result.

But really, we have to tell people to make eye contact and smile if they are within 10 feet of someone and say hello if they’re within five feet?!  No wonder incivility is on the rise!

What to do about it?  Diane Berenbaum, contributing editor of Human Resources IQ has four suggestions:

1. Increase Awareness.  Educate employees about the cost and impact of uncivil behavior.
2. Create Workplace Standards and Value Civility.
3. Provide Internal Training and Coaching.
4. Encourage Open Communication and Feedback.

According to P.M. Forni, the co-founder of the Johns Hopkins Civility Project and author of Choosing Civility, “Encouraging civility in the workplace is becoming one of the fundamental corporate goals in our diverse, hurried, stressed and litigation-prone society.”

If civility isn’t one of your corporate goals, should it be?

Honesty is more than not lying.  It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living, and truth loving.  ~James E. Faust

It seems that the news was inundated with accusations of lying last week; and those being accused are in leadership positions.  The first is Brian Williams.  The Business Insider reported the following on February 13.

Brian Williams has quickly plummeted to a low point in his career.

Williams, who anchored “NBC Nightly News” until he received a six-month suspension last week, went from being the 23^rd-most-trusted person in America a little over a week ago to falling to the 835^th spot.

Some NBC insiders have speculated that Williams will not be able to come back from the scandal that has engulfed him since he admitted to embellishing a story from his coverage of the Iraq invasion in 2003.

Williams recounted the story several times over the past 12 years, exaggerating his role in the incident over time.  Most recently, he said he was traveling in a helicopter that was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, but after a veteran involved in the event questioned his story, Williams admitted he was actually riding in another helicopter that was about 30 minutes behind the one that was hit.

NBC launched an internal investigation, and since then other possible exaggerations have surfaced.

And right here at home in Chicago, the Jackie Robinson West little league team who won the National Championship was stripped of their title because of accusations that the adults recruited team members outside of their district in order to enhance their team.  It is still unclear to me if the adults did this intentionally or inadvertently, but the fact does remain that some of their players were not residents within the district.

Why do we lie?  Especially why do those in leadership positions who have both a great deal of influence and a great deal to lose (i.e., Brian Williams and little league coaches)?  Thomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote about why we lie on January 2, 2015 (prior to either of these announcements) in HBR:

It boils down to the shifting sands of the self and trying to look good both to ourselves and others, experts say.

“It’s tied in with self-esteem,” says University Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman.  “We find that as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels.”

People are so engaged in managing how others perceive them that they are often unable to separate truth from fiction in their own minds, Feldman’s research shows.

These recent incidents should give all leaders reason to pause and ask, how engaged am I in managing how others perceive me?  Am I unable to separate fact from fiction?

The idea of measurement in organizations is directly connected to the whole concept of renewal, one of the essential ingredients of which is abandonment.  What are we going to give up?  What are we going to abandon?  ~Max De Pree

Max De Pree is probably most well-known for his book Leadership is an Art—published in 1989 and considered a leadership classic–and serving as CEO of Herman Miller.  Max’s father, D.J. De Pree, was the founder of Herman Miller, contract furniture manufacturer.  Herman Miller has been consistently recognized as one of Fortune Magazine’s “Most Admired Companies,” having placed at the top of the list for furniture companies for the past 18 consecutive years.

There were three words in this quote from Max that stood out to me: measurement, renewal, and abandonment.  Those are three words that I typically don’t see used in the same sentence.  After I thought about it, I began to realize that connecting the dots among measurement, renewal and abandonment, actually makes a lot of sense even though at first glance it didn’t seem that obvious.

If I’m seeking renewal, of just about anything, I typically begin with determining what I’m going to measure.  If I want to renew my health, I may start by measuring my weight; if I want to renew my business, I may start by measuring my degree of personal reward/fulfillment with the ROI of my time; if I want to renew a relationship, I may begin by thinking about the quality of time vs. the quantity of time I spend in that relationship.

Then comes the hard part, if I’m seeking renewal, what am I going to abandon?   The word abandon is far more specific and extreme than say, “reduce” or “decrease.”  Max is suggesting that I need to determine what I’m going to cease, eliminate, stop, walk away from, etc.  Suddenly, everything seems important, necessary, maybe even critical, so how can I abandon anything?  If I don’t abandon something and only “add-on,” then have I really “renewed”; or have I just modified or tweaked what I’ve always been doing but with the expectation of being renewed?

Letting go is hard, really hard.  But if we want to experience renewal on a personal level, a department level, or an organization level, we must come face-to-face with the idea of abandonment.

If a city wants to begin an urban renewal project, where do they begin?  They typically begin with an area of the city that has been abandoned.  If you own a trademark and don’t file the appropriate renewal forms, your trademark may be considered abandoned and therefore cancelled.  We could probably think of a number of examples where once something is abandoned, the only recourse is to seek some form of renewal.

Renewal follows abandonment.  What in our lives and our organizations are we willing to abandon in order to experience renewal?

One of the biggest problems in organizations is that the meeting is a tool that is used to diffuse responsibility.  ~Al Pittampalli

Death by Meeting is the title of one of Patrick Lencioni’s bestselling books.  I was reminded of this book title when I heard an interview this week on NPR with consultant and author, Al Pittampalli.  Here’s a brief excerpt:

Bryan Stockton, CEO at Mattel came as the toymaker’s best-known brands like Barbie stagnated and it was losing business to Web-based games.  Stockton himself said that Mattel lacked an innovative culture and blamed it in part on something specific: bad meetings.

Experts say poorly run meetings grind away at employee engagement and make companies less reactive by bogging decisions down in human red tape. Some companies, including Mattel, try to create limits around the size, duration or frequency of meetings.

But meetings often last longer than they need to because managers don’t understand Parkinson’s Law.  This is the idea, backed up by research, tasks take as long as the time allotted. If you budget two hours, it takes two hours.

Pittampalli says, “We’ve fallen victim to mediocre meetings, not about coordination but about bureaucratic excuse making and the kabuki dance of company politics.  We’re now addicted to meetings that insulate us from the work we ought to be doing. By isolating and destroying the mediocre meeting, we can revamp the way projects are organized, decisions are made, and work gets done.”

He sees “not just marathon meetings, but meetings that are done to prepare for meetings, and meetings that are done to prepare for meetings to prepare for meetings. It is a waste of time — it’s what I call a weapon of mass interruption.”

It’s also expensive to waste employee time. So why does the practice persist?

“One of the biggest problems in organizations is that the meeting is a tool that is used to diffuse responsibility,”Pittampalli says.

He says meetings alleviate the anxiety of making tough calls by delaying decisions, instead of making them.

Breathe a little life into your meetings with these three steps.

• Know why you’re meeting, and make sure everyone else knows as well (write the purpose/objective of the meeting boldly on the agenda).
• Schedule the meeting for 25%-50% fewer minutes than you think you need.
• End the meeting with action items and individuals assigned to those action items with timelines.  (If you skip this step, chances are you didn’t make any decisions and possibly wasted everyone’s time).