Recognize Learning, Not Outcomes

I believe that some of our willingness to work hard is born into us, or learned at a very early age. The rest we learn through our life experience. I was fortunate enough to discover the virtue of hard work as a four year old child. I attended a preschool that had a scheduled nap time in the early afternoon. I had no interest in sleeping, yet I was asked to lay down silently while all the other children slept. After a few days of laying there silently studying my surroundings, I proposed a deal with the teachers. If I was quiet, they would allow me to sweep the gated courtyard outside while the other children slept. To this day, I am still stunned they agreed. Every day as the other children drifted off to sleep I took the broom out and began sweeping. The teachers fully expected that I would grow tired of the work, and want to lay down and sleep. No. I just worked. I swept until they took the broom back from me at the end of nap time each day. I wanted to be doing something useful, and the sweeping task gave me a sense of purpose. These qualities have served me well over the years; both the negotiating, and the hard work.

More than four decades later, I’m now a father of four. My eldest was just accepted into his first choice university. Throughout my experience as a father, I recall a number of conversations with my children when I have shared elements of my life philosophy. Certain aspects of my philosophy have been reinforced through years of personal experience, but began as lessons from my own parents. One conversation with my son recently was about the relative value of well directed effort.

Simply stated, it’s better to work hard at something than to simply rely on your strength or intelligence. Applying consistent and well directed effort at something allows you to learn and adapt to improve at something incrementally over time, allowing you to enjoy incremental progress through the journey rather than expecting quick success based on superiority. The combination of intelligence and hard work can be even more effective. When you choose your praise, focus on the effort, not the intelligence or the outcome.

When I review my life and consider what I am most proud of, I recognize my hardest achievements yield more pride than any of the easy ones. This leads me to wonder: What causes us to choose to work hard at something? For me, it happens when I feel a sense of purpose in my work. This means that I truly care about the goal or the process, and I’m willing to take whatever journey is needed to deliver. Once the goal is achieved, I feel a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment. Inspiring journeys allow us to feel fulfilled along the way, so that we view the work as enjoyable rather than as suffering. This is like the way I felt sweeping at preschool.

Almost all of us can relate to a situation where we have needed to do work that we do not enjoy. Some of us will recall a time where we happily decided to do this work because one of our leaders was able to connect it to a larger sense of purpose, and intentionally recognized the progress we made. Hard work becomes easier when we clearly see how our individual contributions fit into a larger result.

This interview of our CEO visiting Stanford highlights this principle of structuring recognition to reward what matters most (effort) over what we desire (outcomes). Let’s review Sundar Pichai’s remarks:

“You have to encourage innovation. One of the counterintuitive things is companies become more conservative as they grow. You have a lot more cash. You have a lot more resources. But companies tend to become more conservative in their decision making. And so encouraging the company to take risks and innovate and be okay with failure and reward effort, not outcomes. And that’s very hard to do in an organization. People tend to reward outcomes, which means over time, the organization becomes more conservative. They take safer bets and so on. So a lot of scaling is about making sure you preserve the good things you had in the early days. And that gets harder as the company becomes bigger. You have to work harder at it. But I think a big part of what we try hard to do is to keep that culture of innovating with technology, building products, shipping things.”

I admit, in my work I do pursue outcomes. We all do. As both a leader and an innovator, I also strive to maximize effort and attempts in pursuit of my goals. We strive to set the conditions to accept risk, and constantly learn from our attempts to build the resilience that forms our foundation for success. Repeated failure and adaptation is a brutal but rapid way to learn and make incremental progress. To foster a culture of innovation, our teams must be willing to constantly take risks and learn, and continually re-apply the lessons from those attempts into their next pursuits. If you punish failure, your team will grow averse to risk. Your rate of innovation will decline, and soon you’ll find that your competitors run circles around you.

Recognizing learning is a way of reinforcing well directed hard work. I’m not suggesting that we reward all forms of failure. For example, if someone failed because they employed an anti-pattern and deviated from our rules or violated the law, that should indeed be met by corrective action rather than praise. However, if someone failed because they took a calculated risk that did not work out, and they subsequently applied a lesson from that failure, that expression of resilience should be recognized and encouraged.

The more frequently we take reasonable risks, the faster our learning cycle will become. If we can learn in rapid bursts, and continually adapt our approach based on what we learn, then we will make more progress than moving slowly and trying to get everything right along the way. Deliberation is usually slow, whereas experimentation can be very quick. If we set the conditions for our teams to constantly take these kinds of experimental risks, and encourage us to quickly apply what we learn, we will get further faster.

When we hire, we may choose to select the smartest, or the most successful candidates. Perhaps our criteria should strongly consider a candidate's ability to rapidly learn and adapt. If we recruit people who exhibit these characteristics, our teams will grow more resilient and adaptive as we hire and grow. If we recognize learning as a benefit of our attempts, and set the conditions for taking reasonable risks then we can encourage both naturally hard working people and those who learned over time how to perform.

Persistence is key to achievement. If we give up the moment times start to get hard, then we may rob ourselves from a potential opportunity to learn and adapt. Our persistence does not necessarily need to be continuous. We can put something down, consider for a while, and later pick it back up. What matters is that we continue to adapt as we revisit a challenge, and control our risk so that we have few regrets if the outcome is not what we hope for.

In summary, take calculated risks. Find purpose in your journey. Take pride in your achievements, and don’t give up easily. Whether you choose sleeping or sweeping, focus on learning and apply what you learn to adapt.