Why you should let your employees fail

http://www.s-fbi.com/2015/08/18/why-you-should-let-your-employees-fail/

by frieze • 11 years ago

48 42 11 years ago

s-fbi.com

tux• 11 years ago

Mirror: https://archive.is/gWlZS

juhq• 11 years ago

<marquee>Unavailable in your country</marquee>

Such class

BrentOzar2• 11 years ago

"Error establishing a database connection"

Maybe you should rethink that rule when it comes to your sysadmins and database admins.

bbrazil• 11 years ago

It's also important to let your admins fail, and let the people and systems improve based on what you learn from the failure.

Being completely risk averse creates an environment where it's very difficult to improve, for fear that your good change will happen to cause a problem and you'll get blamed for it.

BrentOzar2• 11 years ago

That's not what the article is about - the article explicitly talks about when you know the employee's approach won't work and you'll have to do their work over, let them fail anyway without telling them in advance.

That's not being risk averse. That's bad management. A manager's role is also that of a mentor, helping your employees leapfrog over obstacles you've encountered in the past. (Don't get me wrong, there's a wrong way to do it - micromanagement.)

tired_man• 11 years ago

There's a difference between being adverse to failing at some task and not wanting your venture to crash.

For vital infrastructure, it's more important that those "failures" be more in the way of the dba or sa needing to look up how to make something work properly, than actually fry the server instance and wipe your data.

RyanZAG2• 11 years ago

I guess if you have a big enough runway, this could work out. For most startups, letting your employees fail means letting your company fail when you run out of money. Nobody is going to give you more money when the stuff your employees were working on failed. Especially when they're trusting your resume to get the job done and you should have known better.

collyw• 11 years ago

That's exactly what I was thinking. Letting them fail is going to be expensive.

Xylakant• 11 years ago

Not letting them fail when the fallout can be contained and managed will increase the risk that they fail in a way that you can't contain or manage further down the road.

makeitsuckless• 11 years ago

If those are your options, you shouldn't have employees, you should outsource the work.

And I'm not one usually in favor of outsourcing, but having employees is a whole different ballgame. If you can't let them fail, you're not building a team that will add value over outsourcing, so you're better off not taking on all of the complications that come with having employees.

OpenDrapery• 11 years ago

I've spent most of my career as a full time employee, and recently I've become a 'consultant', which is a fancy term for contractor who works for a middle man. I've really become interested lately in the strategies behind using full time employees, when to outsource, why companies use contractors/consultants, etc.

Are there any good books/blogs on the subject matter that anyone knows about?

RyanZAG2• 11 years ago

You can't usually outsource work for share options, and most startups can't afford pure cash compensation for all work. And they can't afford to have their employees fail as all work in a brand new startup is usually critical.

EDIT: Just to make it clear: obviously employees and everyone else are going to fail sometimes, and you need to try have as much in place to survive that. However, failing on purpose for learning experiences is never the correct approach. You will have more than enough chance to fail in areas you don't have solutions for. Make sure you never fail in an area that you had the information to prevent.

tempodox2• 11 years ago

Error establishing a database connection

Did some admin employee fail? We can't tell whether they were being let fail or failed all on their own, but I'd rate the failure as successful.

robin_reala• 11 years ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Akashsharma• 11 years ago

developers at s-fbi.com have failed at making this article live :P

EngineerBetter• 11 years ago

"Nage" is technique, and the person who applies a technique against an attacker is "tori". If the author can't get this right, I would suspect their understanding of the martial art is somewhat shallow.

annnnd2• 11 years ago

Wait, you shouldn't tell him this, he should have learned that all by himself!

I don't agree with the author's view at all. If anything, it angers me when I trust a mentor to guide me and he lets me waste a week before I figure out by myself that the path was wrong from the start. Why do I need him then?

There are many ways one can learn. One is by trying, one is by listening to others. The latter is usually much cheaper in terms of time and resources. The major problem is that we sometimes can't find a suitable person to give us advice in a form we can hear. And now there is someone who preaches that one shouldn't help even when he knows how? Great. </rant>

JoeAltmaier• 11 years ago

Exploration, trial and error, deep diving into a problem are all better ways to learn than listening. Perhaps a combination of the two is best.

moron4hire• 11 years ago

Well, you don't need a mentor.

maffydub• 11 years ago

I think the key word you use here is "guide" - I completely agree that a mentor shouldn't _guide_ you down the wrong path.

...but maybe the mentor wasn't _guiding_ you, but enabling you (by answering your questions) to follow a path _you_chose_ and that turned out to be wrong.

This is important because if you always see yourself as following the mentor's path, you'll never take ownership and become a leader yourself.

As an experienced developer and personnel manager, I find it particularly frustrating when someone comes to me and says "you told me to do it this way, and now it doesn't work - fix it" because it shows that they're not taking any ownership.

Instead, I try to ask questions and make observations about their proposed approach to guide them to what I think is the best solution but, ultimately, they may choose an alternative route... and this might fail. At that point, they normally come back with "I've hit this problem, and it's mine to overcome, but can you help?"

...and I do, gladly. ;)

caw• 11 years ago

When you are the “Uke” you are taught not to give feedback to your partner.

Maybe in aikido, as I've never done it, but in the martial art I practiced for a while uke was feedback. The attacker sets the tempo for the technique, reacts to the tori's strikes, and while they're not supposed to apply the movement for them - they can lead the tori in the correct movement and suggest openings by being strong in some areas and weak in others.

While sharpening a movement, after both sides have some level of skill, they can provide feedback as to weak points in the technique - "I can stand up here, you don't have enough pressure or you haven't moved me off balance enough".

None of this feedback has to be verbal, but you can learn the techniques on both sides. Similarly, while people should learn from small failures, you don't want a catastrophic failure where you go and break uke's arm because someone didn't tell you that you were doing the wrong technique.

kemiller2002• 11 years ago

When you are the “Uke” you are taught not to give feedback to your partner.

This is wrong. Both sides constantly learn from each other. Even the true Shihan learn from their senior students. Don't get me wrong the students are never like "hey sensei you should try this" but they do adjust and refine their skills just like everyone else (if you watch the right videos you can see it if you know what to look for).

The biggest problem I have with the article is this, he states, "he knows his employee will fail." That's not the Aikido way really. His approach should be something more like "I will let him try, so that we may both learn from this experience." Even the masters admit they don't know everything and that they can be surprised by the most novice of people at times. This is demonstrated through many of the samurai's approach to fighting (they avoid it when possible, because they know they might lose).

In my opinion this is a much better approach to management also. I know how to accomplish things, but I may not know the best way (or even the right way at times), and I won't know any more until I learn from someone else, even someone junior to me.

7402• 11 years ago

When I trained in aikido, "nage" was the thrower/defender. See, for example, http://aikido-west.org/handbook/uke_nage.html

stayparanoid• 11 years ago

like your server?

desbo• 11 years ago

You let whoever was in charge of your page's scrolling fail a bit too much.

ryanchartrand• 11 years ago

lol

exelius2• 11 years ago

Aah, the old "nudge them in a direction so when they figure it out they think it was their idea" trick. Very effective; but it takes a degree of trust in your subordinates (namely that they're smart enough to figure it out given enough time).

Anyway, if you take your primary job as a manager to be building your team's skills, it's absolutely the right way to go. People tend to remember lessons they learned the hard way, so I like to let my people fail in small ways because it's instructive.

dustingetz• 11 years ago

One time, as a first-time techlead/manager struggling to get my team to deliver, I tried to let them play with the problem for a bit then give a few nudges in the right direction / the direction I wanted them to go. With some team members it was extremely effective. Others got tunnel vision on the wrong path and I was unable to reach a consensus with them on what a good solution looked like, which snowballed into an inconsistent codebase, and a divided team with morale problems. I probably wasn't the right person to manage this team, or maybe I don't have the same innate manager talents that this author has.

Not saying that my solution is always right, but i definitely think my inability to sell a cohesive technical direction to the entire team hurt the schedule/quality. I think hand-picking people whose opinions align with mine would have really helped the outcome, whether or not my solution was best. Perhaps detaching my ego from the outcome would have helped too. I wouldn't take another high pressure delivery responsibility role without hire/fire power.

exelius2• 11 years ago

IMO this approach is definitely not one-size-fits-all. It's usually best to provide strong leadership up front in the form of clear expectations, but let people experiment in areas outside their comfort zone. This could mean putting some of the more junior team members underneath a senior developer -- the senior developer gets to experiment with management, and the junior developers benefit from some guidance.

Overall, you have to use techniques like this in the context of a situational leadership framework. There's a ton of reading material on situational leadership, but basically it comes down to recognizing the areas where people are knowledgeable and/or confident and providing the right kind of support. The "let 'em fail" tactic is great for people who are confident but not knowledgeable -- they learn something about the topic, and they learn about their own (lack of) understanding of said topic. There are many situations (when people are neither knowledgeable nor confident) that require you to do more hands-on management of your team -- and that's ok, since your goal is to help them move up the knowledge/confidence curve.

Very rarely do managers in our time have hire/fire power; in my experience it's very difficult to fire anyone for performance-related issues. Usually the best you can do is offer to swap your "problem children" with another manager and hope they do better in a new environment.

Why you should let your employees fail

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