Stories of Failure

We spend quite a bit of time focused on Leadership Behaviors at IBM. Specifically, on 1) clearly defining the behaviors of an effective, inspiring leader and 2) providing education and examples to our employees so they can put those behaviors into practice.

Our Transformation & Operations Strategy team recently completed a training series focused on this topic and decided we wanted to dig deeper into the behavior of "Making big bets - Moving beyond comfort to the point of failure. Fail. Learn. And try again."

So last week, thirty team members came together to simply share our own stories of failure. While it may seem we were being set up to embarrass ourselves, what really happened was a beautiful display of vulnerability and incredible growth from our team as we shared some of our hardest and best lessons from failure in our careers.

And the session inspired me to reflect and share my own three stories of failure with all of you- but for today, I'll refer to them as lessons.

Lesson 1: Know your audience

It was the first year of my career when my Director asked me for some ticket data for one of our clients. I was happy to help and went straight to our analytics team, who provided me a spreadsheet with all the data I needed.

So what did I do? I forwarded that spreadsheet to my Director and thought I was callin' it a day.

But to my surprise, just an hour later, I received a phone call from him where he graciously said... "Ashley, what did you want me to do with this spreadsheet?"

I instantly knew I had messed up. I realized then at that moment a lesson that I would take with me in every interaction and project going forward. I needed to know my audience.

You see, instead of just sending a spreadsheet with a bunch of data to the most senior leader in our delivery center, I should have taken the time to figure out the key insights from that data and provide a high level summary of what it was saying.

Ever since then, I have made sure that the information I am sharing is appropriate for my audience by asking myself, "What level of detail do they really need to know?"

Lesson 2: Be Thoughtful over Transactional

A more recent "failure" was when I first started working in our CEO's office and was responsible for keeping a list of items to address with our CEO in our weekly meeting. This list ranged from event invitations to video requests and everything in between.

I would get an email or request in, I'd put it on the list, and then I'd keep moving forward until we got to our meeting with the CEO.

After about a month of this process, I received feedback that while yes, I was getting everything onto the list for each meeting, I was NOT being very thoughtful with it. Instead, I was treating everything as a "transaction."

An email came, I put it on the list, and I moved on.

What was really needed in my role was for me to be more thoughtful about each request that came in. I could do this by asking questions like... what recommendation would I give? What additional information might be helpful to make a decision? What would the next steps be?

From this feedback, I started to think more strategically about the incoming requests instead of treating each of them as a task I needed to complete quickly to get off my plate.

Being thoughtful over transactional allowed me to bring much more value to my CEO and has helped me ever since- in that role and now as part of our Transformation & Operations Strategy team.

Lesson 3: Ask for help

This last story is from my first year as a manager. To put it into perspective, I was 26-years-old with an employee who had been at IBM for 36 years. I was young and felt the pressure to really prove myself to my leaders and my team.

I found the best way to manage a team of seasoned IBMers was to let them do their jobs, to not pretend that I knew their jobs better than they did, and to make sure they knew I was there to support them in any way they needed.

Together, we really found our groove, but one of my smaller teams (of two) was running into issues in supporting a rigorous monthly financial cycle for a client. They were unable to take vacation and had to plan their hours around these intense schedules because we did not have additional people with the skills required to cover for them. Essentially, if anything happened to one of these two people, we were screwed.

I had thought we solved the problem when we hired someone to join the team, but that plan came crashing down when he quit after just a week of training for personal reasons. I was at a loss of what to do to get my team members the relief they so desperately needed.

I also was feeling desperate myself because I wanted to be able to show that I could handle any problem that came my way and that I deserved to be in that leadership role.

But then I remembered the approach I took with my own team and in my role as their manager - that a manager's job is to be there when an employee gets stuck or needs help.

So that day, I did what I had hoped my employees would do - I asked MY manager for help by explaining the situation and the actions I had taken to try to solve it on my own.

HIs first words were, "Yes, of course I can help you here. That is my job and you cannot solve this on your own, nor should you have to."

His words were music to my ears and was such a profound lesson to me... I now know that when I get that helpless feeling and don't know where to go, that is the moment I must raise my hand and ask for help.

I hope these examples of "failure" can be helpful for you to learn from my mistakes, but also for you to reflect on your own moments and lessons you've learned. What's even more powerful than overcoming failure and challenges is allowing others to learn from them, too.

Are you willing to share your failures?