Learning cultures are key to avoiding an overload of stress as we face greater levels of change. Key to making them work is embracing failure and feedback.
This article is part of our series on stress resilience and mental health.
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The role of culture in stress
Culture is a massive factor in stress. A challenge that might be seen as exciting in one culture can be the cause of great distress in another. In part this is down to influences that we have covered in previous articles:
- Levels of support
- Clarity of direction and context
- Openness to creativity
- The opportunity to practice
- The nature of meetings
But perhaps the biggest cultural influence on stress is the organisation’s response to ‘failure’.
Performance culture abhors failure
Organisations have long tended to be performance-obsessed. The financial markets have set a paradigm where profits grow in every cycle. And they expect changes in leadership when they don’t. This is exacerbated by media reporting, which publicly humiliates leaders who fall short in some way.This has created a business culture where failure is seen as something to be avoided at all costs. Where those involved are tarnished and lose credibility, or even benefits. And where, as a consequence, blame, finger-pointing and conflict are rife. The first victim of any conflict is always openness and truth, and so learning becomes ‘in short supply’.
The problem is that these organisations all see ‘failure’ as the antithesis of ‘performance’. Rather than the precursor to it. And this has permeated the culture.
is failure the antithesis of performance?
As a result, for people within those organisations, taking on risk is highly stressful. People do not want to associate themselves with potential failure. As a result, support for challenging projects is difficult to enlist. Therefore, people tend to limit themselves to safe projects – ones that build only marginally on what is already known. Furthermore they select the most capable people in the organisation, and this creates resource conflicts and limits the development opportunities for the less experienced. Real learning, in both the individual and organisational senses of the term, is kept to a minimum. Even the concept of feedback gets subverted – but more on this below.
Learning culture embraces failure
However, healthy organisations with a learning culture treat failure as valuable. They rightly see it is a reflection of the degree of ambition. A natural consequence of a balanced approach to risk. And an opportunity for learning and growth.
In a learning culture, failure is expected. If everything you do is successful, you are clearly not pushing the envelope hard enough. Thriving organisations need creativity and ambition. And these inevitably generate failures.Therefore, in a learning culture, the level of failure is a function of your level of creativity and innovative ambition. Both of which will be necessary for the organisation to thrive. Furthermore, embracing that failure releases new data and insight to the organisation. Creating a culture of openness around failures enables the organisation to get the information that will bring it closer to success. Success that can leap ahead of the performance of organisations with more staid approaches to risk.
failure is a necessary reality in maximising success
But let’s be clear here. A learning culture doesn’t actually prefer failure to success. It just accepts that it is a necessary reality in maximising their success. And they are not willing to limit themselves to ‘safe’ and obvious ways forward which limit and slow their performance potential. Nor do they want their people hiding failure, and thereby denying their colleagues the insights that are available through it.
Which brings us back to feedback.
Feedback as an evaluation
Our attitude to feedback is a key indicator of our culture’s underlying attitude to failure.
In a performance culture, ‘success’ forms a key component of individual identity. Its synonyms are regularly, if informally, used to define and categorise people. And those reputations significantly influence the opportunities and benefits of that individual.
As such, ‘feedback’ can prove somewhat of a liability.
we tend to experience feedback either as an endorsement, or as personal criticism
We all understand ‘intellectually’ that feedback is good for our learning and development. But in a culture where failure is ‘a bad thing’ we tend to experience feedback either as an endorsement, or as personal criticism. It is great when it adds to our reputation and our personal confidence in how we are perceived. But if it highlights any shortcomings, our emotional concerns tend to mask any sense of intellectual joy we may have at being presented with new learning opportunities.
As a result, while our head says we look for feedback so we can identify and address those shortcomings, our heart is saying ‘no way’. We find ourselves becoming emotionally tense inside (even if we manage to suppress the appearance of it). Often, we ‘forget’ to ask for it. We become defensive, or rationalise what we are hearing. And we find explanations that justify us in ignoring it.
Feedback as data and insight
Feedback is an increasingly key component of the ‘future of work’. As more of the routine elements of our roles are automated, more and more of our work will concern change. And more and more of that change will be effected through the relationships we have with colleagues and customers. Our value will be the value we add to others. And key to finding new ways to add value will be our creativity and our ability to to innovate. Not everything will work first time. In a learning culture feedback is crucial to learning from the impact we are having on those around us.
So how do we separate the emotional from the intellectual?
work for an organisation that embraces failure
The first way is “work for an organisation that embraces failure”. If you have influence, then change the culture. If you don’t, then move on. The reality is that if you are stuck in a performance culture that you cannot change, then politically and pragmatically you are stuck with playing the game. However, if you can change the culture, even just your bit of it, then do so. Celebrate failure. Explain why. Champion those who over-reach and innovate. Encourage people to take risks. Reward learning over performance. All in balance of course. Basically, embrace and promote the belief that if you are innovating, you are inevitably having some failures
And give people a better understanding of feedback.
A better understanding of feedback
Feedback is not, and cannot be, any sort of judgement of us. How can it be?
In reality, feedback can only ever be a self-assessment of the person giving the feedback. The only thing they know for sure is how they have been impacted. They are only really equipped to provide feedback on themselves and how they experienced things.
They may, perhaps by tradition or a lack of humility, couch it in terms of judgement and evaluation of you. But how can they know? How can they know all of the factors (including their own attitudes and behaviours) that led up to what they experienced?
They cannot.
Therefore, any attempt at an ‘evaluation of you‘ based on their experience is inappropriate, poorly informed, and probably arrogant.
However, their opinion of what resulted for them is actually vital information for you.
Whatever the reasons led up to them having that opinion, they will act in accordance with it. And so, if they feel they got no value, they will act as though they got no value. And the harsh reality will be that no value will be transmitted through them.
Now, if that is what you intended, fine. But if you intended that they did get value, and were able to use that value effectively to benefit the organisation, then the fact that it hasn’t happened is an important piece of information.
You might not be ‘to blame’. But you are in the best position to realise that you still have a gap to close, and that you may want to adjust some of the variables to make it happen. And if you, as a result, can improve those variables, then you have learned something.
It is not about YOU
And that learning is valuable, but not value-laden. It helps you to grow, but it doesn’t mean you were flawed beforehand.
This understanding of feedback is key. If we, consciously or subconsciously, see it as an evaluation, that will be a barrier to learning. In such situations it can be difficult for us to accept the insight without accepting the ‘judgement’. And learning is much easier to assimilate when it doesn’t come laden with emotional baggage.
Any education worthy of the name is bound to be dangerous (Louis Néel). Real learning at the edge of our potential comes at the cost of of mistakes. But if we can see these mistakes as the inevitable steps to who we were destined to be. The fastest route to the value we can add. Then we can get the very best learning out of each one.
The best thing an organisation can do is to accept this fact, and imbue it into its people. Give them a love of feedback. Equip them with a humility in providing it. Key to this is an acceptance by all concerned that falling short is an expected and admirable consequence of reaching far.
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