Celebrating Failure

You talked about how you really want people in your company to understand that you should take risks, and you should fail. But sometimes that’s easier said than done. How do you create an environment of psychological safety around so people feel like it’s perfectly fine to fail over and over again, until they get that one idea that works?

By rewarding failure. In the end, it’s like, one way, you know, every year, you know, it is a way to engage and have some fun, right? We recognize the boldest ideas, but also, we recognize the biggest failure.

You do?

We do.

How do you recognize them? What do you do?

We have a poodle that we give that gets passed around from employee to employee, it’s just a way to basically show that in the end, what I value is you trying hard, you know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But as long as we keep harvesting those ideas, we have a greater chance to succeed as a company.
And then it’s a lot of work, because you have to be personally engaged, right. So the one thing I am proud of myself is that I know a lot of people by name in this company, again, I grew up from the call center, call level seven, or eight or nine in the organization to level zero, which is the CEO.
And those relationships matter. And when you have trust and followership, it makes a big difference. The other thing I think I have as an advantage is that I know our customers and partners very well. And then I know how the company works, whether it’s good or bad, I know how it works. And so that actually creates credibility, because then you can speak their language.
But in the end, you have to pose all the time problems from customers and say, “Hey, can we think about how we can solve this better than everybody else?” And the question is how we go further and faster, right? That’s the bottom line because we have a say in the company that the future belongs to the fast. And that sense of urgency is the one thing I’m impatient about, but never give up the ‘we’ for the ‘I’, which is the very important aspect here.