As you likely know by now, to the people on a team, managers aren’t peers. They’re usually the people the rest of the team points to as the ones doing everything wrong, the ones holding progress back.
There’s some truth to that.
Managers become managers by previously having been good at something else. Our hierarchical professional structures all but guarantee the “Peter Principle ”—that we tend to rise to the level of our own incompetence. We get good at one thing after another until we end up managing—a skill that presumably has almost nothing to do with whatever we were good at before, a brand new skill for which you have no prior experience.
Congratulations. As a new manager, you’ve just risen to the level of your incompetence.
Don ’t stay that way.
The Peter Principle might be entirely accurate, but it excludes all talk of the idea that we are, in fact, built to improve. Ambition isn’t an inherent evil; it just tends to advance us to higher and higher positions until we reach one for which we have zero skill. This achievement doesn’t render us incapable of learning. We can still learn. We can still do better. We can figure out how to be managers. Then we can figure out how to be great ones.
Likewise, we can learn to be better craftsmen at whatever craft it is we were originally hired to practice. We can help push our professions forward by poking holes in standards and digging for better options. We can remember that it’s more fun to get better than it is to stagnate. Not only will it help you feel more fulfilled, this leading-by-example approach will motivate your entire team.
Learning as a habit means to consistently aim for something better than the present. Whether your skill level, your ability to manage distractions, your sense of empathy or respect for your coworkers, or something else, age and experience and self-examination will almost always eventually present a different perspective than you have now.
Good thing, too. Because if you’d never adopted a strategy of advancing past your current state, you’d have never arrived at where you are now. Keep that strategy and you could lead yourself into any variety of great situations later on.
Besides that, learning simply helps satisfy your own internal drive to be good at what you do. On a long enough timeline, every job turns boring and routine. Learning new things about it makes your work more fun and interesting. It makes you more useful and beneficial to your team. It gives you the best chance of advancing your own career. Not just your job, but your career.
There’s a trick to it, though. You must learn to get your ego out of the way.
As a designer, part of my job was to have people try out my work via usability tests, the goal of this being to find issues in the design that would keep users from successfully completing tasks and being happy with the product we were producing for them. I wasn’t designing printed works, after all—I was designing functionality.
Usability tests are a tough thing the first times.
Strangers come to the office, sit down in a little room with a computer and a microphone and a video camera. You ask them to try to complete various tasks—really important things that everyone should be able to do with your product. They push buttons and click things and talk about what their guesses are how they’re making their decisions. They muddle their way through something you’ve spent a couple of weeks developing into what you think is a pretty good design. Something you’re confident about. They stumble and trip and get lost. Then, someone gets completely stuck on a page and abandons a task you were so sure was simple and clear. They tell you how hard of a time they’re having. And you can’t believe it. And you go home feeling lousy.
But then you get some sleep, and you wake up a little less anxious. You play back the video from the day before and you try to see what they saw. And slowly, you begin to understand how their interpretation was so different from your own.
And you learn from it.
Do this enough times and you realize something vital: they’re not attacking your design; they’re telling you what they need in order to understand it the same way you do. They’re telling you how you can help them. They’re giving you the chance to learn something, to do something better than you did before. They’re telling how to reach a point in the future when you can make better guesses in the first place and end up with fewer problems in your work than you have now.
They’re teaching you to take your ego out of the equation.
It can take a long time to teach yourself that it’s nothing personal. That it’s not about being right or not, or being perfect or terrible on the first try. It’s about learning.
To do that well, you have let your ego be crushed, and then focus on what you can learn rather than how you feel about having been humbled.
All that said, the mindset you have about learning is key.
An idea has been going around the business world for the past few years that failure is a good thing. Failure, so the idea goes, means you’re making the good attempt to break past the typical and achieve something more. If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough. “Fail early, fail often,” they say.
It’s a lot like the aforementioned Peter Principle, in fact—rising to the level of your incompetence.
But I have a problem with this notion of failure as a positive goal. Not so much with the idea behind it—you’d have never become a manager had you not been willing to push yourself. My problem is with the phrasing.
Repetition is a core tenet of the persuasion industry. Say something over and over again, according to some strategies, and people often begin to believe it, regardless of whether it has any merit. For example, we’ve all heard for years now that pit bulls are lethal, and we’ve learned to accept it as truth whether the notion has any real merit or not (hint: statistically, it really doesn’t).
You can use this for positive purposes, like building enthusiasm for a product vision for the team of people responsible for building it. But repetition also reinforces your own beliefs. The more you say something, the harder it is to change your own mind about it later.
Failing is a negative idea. Even if you know that the intent of “fail early, fail often” is the opposite of its wording, having the word “fail ” sitting in your head all day can be outright self-destructive. Your brain is hardwired to feel negatively about negative words.
It’s far better to set a goal you want to achieve.
Like succeeding.
Rather than fail early and often, try examining every situation for what good can come out of it, what insight can be gleaned from it. Focus on the wins, and celebrate them.
Besides that, failing only teaches you how to fail. Success teaches you how to succeed.
When startup entrepreneurs succeed once, they are more likely to succeed again. When they fail, however, they are just as likely to fail the next time around as they were the first time. This is what venture capitalists have found to be true, anyway.
Some people believe you can learn as much from failing as you can from succeeding. This is just not true. There are a billion ways to do both, but only one of these outcomes is desirable. You’re not trying to learn how to fail. That’s absurdly easy to do. There’s nothing to learn there. You’re trying to learn to succeed.
Fail once and you’ve learned one way to fail. But succeed once and you’ve learn at least one way to succeed. And if you learn to succeed one way, your odds go up for learning to do it another way. Because in the process of succeeding, you pick up a few skills necessary for doing it again. You learn how to shift strategies. How to prioritize. How to rethink. How to sit back and stare at the rafters for a minute to reimagine how you’ll achieve the goal. You learn how to push through the obstacles. How to align the variables that will give you a positive outcome.
Most of all, you learn that success is possible, which is essential to believing it can happen again.