S2E7: Leadership Hack - Owning Your Failures (feat. Dave Tomczyk, Ph.D.)

Rahul 

Welcome to Learning to Lead, a podcast about leadership, teamwork, and reimagining healthcare. This podcast is for learners, educators, and healthcare professionals interested in building leadership skills in a supportive community.

We are your hosts Rahul Anand, Maya Doyle, Peter Longley, Amber Vargas, and Brooklynn Weber.

Together we bring you conversations with emerging and established leaders, deep dives and hacks to help you become the best leader you can be.

Rahul

Welcome to Learning to Lead. Today's Leadership Hack is with Dave Tomczyk, Ph.D., a powerhouse of insight when it comes to pitching, entrepreneurship, and leadership. Dave, what is one of your favorite hacks or tools to become a better leader?

Dave

I love this question because my favorite answer to it is failure. And that sounds like a weird thing, but I do not think that we fail enough. Now, I don't know about you guys, but during almost every single graduation I've been through, and I've been through quite a few, they talk about go out and don't fear failure, and yeah, cool. Don't fear it, but if I do fail, I'm gonna get punished for it. And that's embarrassing and that's huge problems for like my career and life. So how do we do failure? So for effective leaders, there's two things that you should know about leadership. The first is when you are in a leadership position or when you are first on in a career, when you make a mistake, acknowledge the mistake, apologize for it, say what you're going to do to correct it and then follow through.

It is that simple. Honest to goodness, one of my favorite stories comes from a colleague of mine and he will be quite happy that I am sharing that he nearly cost a Fortune 500 company, $100 million because he put the amount of money to be drawn out of a bank account one day early. He had it coming out of the account on December 31st, when it should have come out on January 1st, and the end result was that the account got over drafted and that was not good. As soon as he got the notification that this was a problem, he immediately called up not only his boss, but all the other relevant people said, here's what I'm going to do to fix it. He spent the next 48 hours working frantically to get it all straightened away, got the bank involved, got everything set aside, and at the end he said, here's what I'm going to do to make sure that that never happens again.

And the end result was, sure, there were quite a few people who were like, for shame, don't do this. But they were also really impressed with the fact that he took the responsibility to correct it, and they started to look at him as a reliable person. There's a really good book called What Got You Here Won't Get You There, which is written by an executive coach who talks about one of the big failings that many people going up in leadership do is that they try to hide away their failures. They brush them off. They are like, no, no, that's not a problem. And they try to redefine it, gaslighting other people, or they try to shift the blame to other people. I'm personally blameless. It's totally Brooke's fault or what. No, own it. Everyone knows who actually caused it. I can try to blame Brooke as much as I want to, but everyone on their brother knows that it's actually me that did it.

So take ownership of that failure and walk through it. Now, I said that there's a part for you as the person who causes failure, but inevitably you're going to have employees and they are going to also mess up. You probably have heard things like punish in private reward in public, and those are really, really good sayings because it's all about how would we want to be treated? We don't want to be chewed out in front of others, so pull the person off to the side. But the biggest thing of all is how do you create an organization that allows for the inevitability of failure? Things are going to go wrong. So do you just fire that person? Do you scream at them? Do you pull them aside every single time they make a mistake? There's another really good book called The Right Kind of Wrong, and the author talks about how do you build an organization that's resilient to failure?

And it's not by punishing failure, and it's not by saying, we only reward success. It's by creating an environment where people can fail and the organization as a whole learns from that failure. If I do something wrong, I take ownership of it, the organization helps support me in that. And we say, look, that's an investment in you. And then we say, is there stuff that the rest of us can learn from it? Is there a new practice that we should follow? Are there new policies we should put in place? And if the answer is yes, we do so. And if the answer is no, then we don't. Before Netflix became the weird beast of a company, it is now, when it first was starting out, they had a culture deck, which was a series of PowerPoint slides that explained their philosophy towards, well, pretty much everything.

And one of their core things was, we don't add policies. And that seems weird because it was a large company even years ago, but their whole thing is if Dave, the employee, misuses the company credit card, and it's very clear that it was a one-off thing. Oops, he, he accidentally used it to buy food and he shouldn't have done that. Whatnot. Instead of saying, well, now we're gonna create a new policy about how to use credit cards for every single person to follow. They said, Dave, that was stupid. Don't do that again, and then just let everyone go because it was one person who made the mistake. Not everyone. Now, don't get me wrong, there are certain things where you definitely need to have policies in place or a reaction that affects everyone. If something resulting in a life-threatening event, if there is something that is destroying the company culture and you want certainly block that off, sure.

But most of the time people inherently don't want to fail. And so if you give them the chance to grow from it and you say, it is okay, you get the one pass, we'll go forward from there. They will self-correct, they will come up with better ways of doing things. And that's incredible. I'm going to end this by talking about one thing I learned during my time at NASA. So I was a young, fairly dumb guy, about 25 years old. I was working for one of the jobs I had in the office of the Chief Information Officer, and I was looking at IT security specifically. I was tasked with trying to make the IT security training better for NASA. We had a program, it was overseen by a contractor, and the response rate to the whole thing was pretty mediocre. We were hovering somewhere between 50 and 70% of people even did the training, much less passed it or remembered it a couple of months out.

So young go-getter, Dave goes, gets his task, goes online, goes to a forum and says, Hey, I work at NASA and we're looking at changing our training, and what do you guys have? I found out that the IT security community is relatively small. And so some of the people saw the forum post, they contacted the contractor, she called my boss and she's like, am I getting fired? What's going on? This is a disaster. So I got called into my boss's office and he said, Dave, you need to think things through. You need to be more careful. And I was like, got it. That was a simple mistake. It was an honest one. And so honest mistakes are totally fine. It's a one-off. So I go back to my desk, sat down, go 10 pages deep into Google, start looking for the most remote of remote forums and whatnot.

And I find one and I go on there and I post and I say, Hey, I'm at NASA, we doing this IT security training, da, da, da. An hour later I was back in my boss's office, and all he does is he picks up the phone, hits speaker, hits voicemail, and I hear the voice of our contractor, I thought you said that this was being fixed. Am I being fired? Da, da da. She was the forum moderator. So that was really bad. So I went from making a stupid mistake to now making a lazy mistake. And that is the worst kind of mistake of all see honest mistakes, everyone makes them. Not a problem, a stupid mistake. Not everyone makes them, but hopefully you learn from that. But when you get to the lazy mistake, that's when people say, this is who you are. It took me a long time to rebuild the trust that I burned through that, both with the contractor and with my boss, because incidentally, we didn't fire her. That wasn't the goal. Uh, and I learned a very important thing. Honest mistakes are okay. Anything beyond that isn't.

Rahul

Wow. I so appreciate you being vulnerable and sharing that, first of all. Yeah. And second, from personal experience, I can relate that it takes time and work to get over and mistakes like that. And it's a sign that you've truly forgiven yourself when you found meaning in those mistakes and now can share them with others to benefit from. So thank you.

Dave

You're very welcome.

Rahul

I have two reflections and then a follow up question. The first lesson you taught us there is do not be afraid to make mistakes or fail. And I remember when I joined Netter, Dean Bruce Koeppen at that time, who had hired me. Gave me an empty mug as a joining gift, and he said, just like this mug will sometimes spill, you will make mistakes. So do not be afraid. Go mistakes, as long as you learn from them and you are ready to refill your mug and keep going. So it reminded me of how leaders are the ones who set the culture and yes, free up their followers to fail early and fail often. The second lesson you taught us is about being accountable to learn from our mistakes. And it reminded me of Jocko Willink and his TED Talk, “Extreme Ownership” that we share with our students and use in our leadership course as well, where you talk about being accountable for learning from our mistakes. Otherwise what are they worth if we're not gonna learn from them? And your story of going from a honest mistake to a lazy mistake really drove home that point. I wanna ask you a follow up question because in healthcare, even honest or small mistakes can be costly. And so, we certainly have a stigma of failing. One thing from the entrepreneurship and design thinking world that may help our listeners is the concept of starting small and prototyping. Can you talk about that and how that can be used to make it okay to fail?

Dave

Yeah. So the earliest reference that I remember seeing that really, really became popular, Eric Ries did a book about The Lean Startup, and he talked about MVP: Minimum Viable Product. And the idea is that instead of trying to make this the perfect, most amazing everything, well just create something, get out there and get the feedback. Because whatever you create inevitably is not going to be right. And that's a really good idea to take. Whether it is a physical thing that you're making, a prototype, a digital spreadsheet, whatever you're creating isn't going to be right the first time. Probably not gonna be right the fifth time or the hundredth time. It's going to be constantly changing In entrepreneurship, there's something known as the entrepreneurial death trap of the perfect mouse trap, which is you sit there and you engineer it and you reverse engineer it, and you sideways engineer it and you upside down engineer it, and you make it the most amazing mousetrap ever.

But it took you 50 years to get there, and by the time that you have it, it's probably obsolete. And 10 other companies have come out and done something better. Perfection is the enemy of progress. And we hear that saying all the time, but it's important for a reason. Now, don't get me wrong, there's certain things that you do want to be perfect on. If you're doing surgery, try not to make too many mistakes. But even there, when you focus on perfection, what happens is you are dedicating a ton of resources to not failing. Well, that's great, but not failing doesn't mean that you're succeeding well. So you can either dedicate resources to not failing, or you can focus on how do I maximize success? How do I make it the most likely to happen, and how do I make it the biggest impact when it does happen?

So going back to the original question, when you're saying they're working with a prototype that's focusing on success max maximization, let's get it out there. Let's get the feedback when it costs very little, when the risk of failure is relatively low, and get that feedback and improve it. Now, does that mean that you should just like do a quick and dirty sketch on a napkin and show that to the world? No. Take some time, refine it, make it to the point where people can look at it and say, ah, I understand what you're doing. Let me give you good critical feedback on what it's like, how it works. If you're testing out a new flavor of sandwich, make some samples of it. But don't worry about having the high quality panini press in order to get the exact right crisp on the bread, get it out there, get people to try it, get the feedback.

Rahul

Love it. So the hack I'm taking away is do not be afraid to fail. Start small, be accountable. Learn from your mistakes. Keep building and maximize your chances of success in projects and in life.

Dave

A hundred percent, yes.

Rahul

Alright, thanks again for joining us on Learning to Lead. Next week, we are going to come back with a full episode with Dave Tomczyk on how to pitch. Until then, keep leading and learning.

Brooke

Thank you for listening to our show. Learning to Lead is a production of the Quinnipiac University podcast studio, in partnership with the Schools of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences. 

Creators of this show are Rahul Anand, Maya Doyle, Peter Longley, Amber Vargas and Brooklynn Weber.

The student producer is Brooklynn Weber, and the executive producer is David DesRoches.

Connect with us on social media @LearningToLeadPod or email us at LearningToLeadPod@quinnipiac.edu.