Embracing Mistakes: Cultivating a Growth-Oriented Culture
Explore the transformative power of viewing mistakes as opportunities for learning within an organization. This session delves into how a people-first approach to leadership can foster a culture of growth, trust, and collaboration. Hear firsthand experiences and proven strategies for managing through mistakes to achieve positive outcomes. Attendees will leave with actionable insights on how to create an environment where employees feel valued and supported, paving the way for continuous improvement and success.
All right, good afternoon, everyone.
Welcome back to day two of Pulse Europe, 2024.
Hope everyone is well fed and watered.
This is our penultimate session of the day,
so you're all on the home stretch now.
This is track six crucial insights for human first leaders,
and we have another amazing speaker lined up for you today.
My name is Harry, I'm part of the Customer Success Team
here at Gain Sight in Europe.
And you should know the drill by now,
but just as a reminder, please do use the Q&A in Slido
as part of the session, drop into the Pulse Europe app.
This is track six.
You can submit your questions throughout,
and then we will take them at the end.
And just in case you were wondering, after the event,
you will have the opportunity to get a copy of all of the slides
and the audio recording from today.
So feel free to take photos, but you can access all of the content
in the Pulse Library within the next few weeks.
All right, I'm really excited to welcome our next speaker on stage,
Jessica Bobbitt, who is Senior Director of Customer Success at Genesis.
A fun fact about Jessica is that she likes to forage wild mushrooms
and eat them.
And just to clarify, they are the traditional mushrooms
and not any other variety, in case you're wondering,
we are announced now after all.
Jessica's session is entitled "Embracing Mistakes Cultivating
a Growth-Oriented Culture."
We'll explore the transformative power of viewing mistakes
as opportunities for learning within an organization.
This session delves into how a people first approach to leadership
can foster a culture of growth, trust, and collaboration.
Here first-hand experiences from Jessica-improving strategies
for managing through mistakes to achieve positive outcomes.
Attendees will leave with actionable insights on how to create
an environment where employees feel valued and supported,
paving the way for continuous improvement and success.
So please give a warm welcome to Jessica.
[APPLAUSE]
Hi, everyone.
It's nice to see you all here.
So many faces.
This is great.
Shoulder pads in the '80s went hand in hand.
Sometimes you recognize mistakes as they're happening,
and sometimes it takes reflection.
I don't know if the designers would look back and say
that was a mistake, but I'm pretty glad that trend hasn't
come back around.
Earlier this year, we were honoring our interns
and asked them what their learnings were.
And one of them shared a little story.
And the takeaway was that they felt comfortable making mistakes.
I had just submitted this session.
I was like, this is great to hear.
And diving deeper, what he said was, he was scared.
He realized he made a mistake.
He actually locked a whole development team
out of a development environment.
He had to fess up to that one.
But the leader, his manager, kind of chuckled and was like, well,
we'll get through it.
And you learn something, right?
He's like, oh, yeah, I learned a lot.
And that really is a good example of how mistakes can
lead to culture and growth culture.
He was scared, but it was OK.
And I think that's a big takeaway.
But how do you get there?
Mistakes happen in our lives, in our working world.
And what can you do to help that become the norm as a leader?
A light bulb moment for me was a few years ago.
We had a new team.
It was under two years old.
We were doing a lot of new processes.
And we had a new hire.
We were going around sharing introductions and a tip.
Mid-career person encouraged the tip,
was encouraging the new hire to ask questions
and to be OK, making mistakes.
And again, I was like, oh, this is really good.
And he went on to say that this was the first job he'd had
that were he felt comfortable making mistakes.
And that was really the light bulb moment for me,
because I wanted to understand how that happened,
and how I contributed to that, how the culture contributed
to that, because I wanted to replicate that.
We were still evolving and learning
and doing these new processes.
And that was important to me.
So a senior leader kind of asked me
how I thought that happened.
Then as I thought about it, I was like, well,
there's some leadership practices
that I do that may have helped.
So I believe in quiet pauses or awkward silences,
some people say, that kind of 30 seconds.
Often on a customer calls, where you might first experience it,
if you're quiet long enough, then something comes out, right?
You hear something from the customer
or that's going on that can be really helpful.
So but this is true in our teams and internally as well.
Being comfortably uncomfortable and continuously learning.
So these leadership practices are things
that I think help not only me show up and be vulnerable to my team.
They can model the behavior, but also allows them the growth
and creates that culture, that environment.
So as I said, awkward silences really open up
that space for communication.
And you learn things that you wouldn't have even thought to ask.
Being comfortably uncomfortable for me
is approaching a situation when you may not
know how a result is going to turn out.
Or you may show up not feeling totally prepared or ready
for whatever that situation is.
But you're showing up anyway and you're going to do your best.
Again, that leads to growth, right?
Which is what we're trying to do here.
If we're trying to get to high performing teams,
whether it's being on a high performing team
or leading a high performing team.
And last is continuous learning.
And I think as a CS professional, that's
something that most of us really buy into.
So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that one.
How are all these things connected, right?
The mistakes happen.
We want to be a part of a high performing team.
We want to lead high performing teams.
But how can those coexist to really enable that growth
and leading through growth?
As we've heard in a lot of the sessions
with the economic times or conditions, right,
we may be asked to do more and more with sometimes even
fewer resources than we might have or expanding capabilities
with the same teams.
And so leading through that and knowing
you may have to manage through mistakes is it's possible.
And I do think that you can have mistakes
and have a high performing team.
So here is our first poll.
So I feel like common mistakes that we've probably all
experienced at least one of.
Yeah.
Not being on mute when you thought you
were or replying to all instead of just the person who
sent the email.
Depending on the context of each of these particular mistakes
or learning scenarios, depending on how you think about that,
it may have a big impact or it may not, right?
Context is really important when an event like that happens.
And often I think we get stuck on that.
What was the steps?
What did I miss?
Or how did we get there?
Why didn't they know to do whatever it was?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, go to this resource, ask that person,
whatever it may be.
And it is important to understand that the context,
we do have to deal with the mistake or event, right?
But we also want to take time to reflect
so we can get the learning that's actually
going to lead to growth.
You may have heard leaders say mistakes
are just a natural part of learning or mistakes are necessary.
But they're still scary, right?
No one really wants to make a mistake.
So the ability to recognize a situation in which it might
happen or the self-awareness when something is happening
can also lead to that kind of self-reflection
or the learning so it doesn't happen again.
Those of you who have replied all to an email
instead of just the sender, like immediately,
did you come up with three or five things in your mind
that every time you need to do this,
maybe you're not emailing while you're on a Zoom call
or you're not going to reply from your phone
or whatever that may be.
So that's that self-awareness and correction.
You're kind of going through a tool set or creating
the tool set in a framework without really even thinking
about what you're doing is my guess.
But those tool sets and frameworks
really help people in a lot of ways.
They help us learn.
They help us reflect.
They help us achieve goals.
And it can be really important, again,
in that self-awareness and correction.
So there's actually all kinds of apps
for these sorts of things now, like a couch to 5K
for somebody who's true.
And that's what we never want.
It typically happens when we know something,
but we did it wrong.
So it was accidental.
Maybe it's misspelling.
Maybe it's that reply all.
But it tends to happen when we're not focused or distracted.
And I said, blue, the sloppy is actually the pink.
The aha mistakes.
Those tend to be-- something may have turned out OK,
but maybe we didn't get there on the path that we thought
we were going to get there.
So we may be surprised that it was successful,
and then there's a learning in there.
Aha mistakes are also unintentional,
but they're informative, where a sloppy mistake,
you may feel bad about it or ashamed
or you don't want to fess up to it.
And aha mistakes, you may be a little confused about it
or a team member maybe like, huh, OK, well, I don't know,
but it worked and not really understand how or why.
The bottom right, the orange, high stakes mistakes,
those are really calculated risks.
So that may be something big, like a new product line
or a new startup, those things.
I'm not going to talk very much about that.
And then we have the stretch mistakes.
So many of you may understand the concept
of stretch assignment.
And the stretch mistake is very much in the same realm,
where it tends to be a challenge in an area
because you haven't done it before,
or you haven't built the capability,
where you feel ready or capable or have the experience
for the situation that we're facing.
And kind of like the continuous learning for CS,
I think we've all been through this
or are currently living through this, right?
How do we do scale teams?
How do we build learning into our subscriptions or our tools?
How do we get data sets that are disconnected or silos
kind of together so that we can use that data?
So we've all been in that scenario, I think.
The big whoop here is, what is that big deal, right?
So it's how can we take these different mistakes
or understanding that and have that framework
or tool set in place so that we can get that
to be part of culture and lead to growth?
Again, if we're stuck in sloppy mistakes,
we're probably not going to get to the stretch world, right?
You may not get a stretch assignment
or give a stretch assignment to someone on your team
if there is a pattern of sloppy mistakes.
If we identify that or can work through that
and again have those strategies, right?
Instead of replying during meetings to emails,
I'm going to set aside my meetings are only 45 minutes
so I have time each hour to look at something
or reply, that would be a strategy.
The aha mistakes, again, I think as a leader here,
part of what's important is having the time to reflect
whether that's a one-on-one or with a team
'cause it could be you're seeing a pattern of mistakes
or gaps or opportunities across a function
and one single individual may not see that.
So how can we take those kind of aha moments
and turn them into the growth or high-performing areas, right?
How can we make whatever's working work better?
And then stretch mistakes, that's really where I want to be, right?
I want to be nurturing and coaching people on my team
through that area.
I may want a stretch assignment myself
to be able to learn something new
or build my skillset or portfolio.
So that's kind of the fun area for me.
Some people may think the high stakes mistakes
are really fun, haven't gotten there yet.
So what I have done and what I was thinking about
when that leader kind of asked me,
how did that space create for the individual
to feel comfortable making mistakes?
So part of it was kind of my leadership principles.
You all may have different ones that help guide you,
the awkward silence, continuous learning,
and comfortably uncomfortable.
And part of it was really action-driven,
which is this kind of framework or tool set.
So when a mistake happens,
I absolutely address it one-on-one with an individual.
If there maybe were multiple people
I may have separate conversations, right?
And okay, well, what's your side?
Or how did we get there?
What did the customer say?
Or whatever it may be?
And get the context in the background.
And I think it's important to separate that
from kind of a team learning or reflection.
I'm not a big believer in pointing fingers,
and blame, and shame.
That's not the kind of learning that I want to do
with my team.
So I really separate those out.
And I've also through various learnings or mistakes,
kind of learned to do that in parallel, right?
'Cause it may take a while to get through a mistake.
And if you wait too long, sometimes it's hard
for to get those learnings or see the reaction.
So kind of doing those things in parallel.
And some tools I use are start,
stop, continue type meetings.
And then we'll talk about team meeting discussions
and a climber card, which is another tool that I use.
Hopefully these are takeaways that may help you specifically,
either through a situation,
or to build into a regular practice.
So stop, start, continue.
How many of you have done either participated
or led one of these meetings, right?
So it could be really big, like we're getting
towards the end of a calendar year.
Do I want to stop, start, continue with the team
and thinking about what we're doing next year?
And it could be really narrow focus, right?
Around a process gap.
So maybe I'm thinking about that aha area.
If there's like, oh, this is frustration,
or this process is really manual
and can lead to mistakes because it's so manual.
What can we do around that?
So I find that stop, start, continue
is a really good way to get the team brainstorming.
And again, I hear from various people across the team.
And then I can have a better understanding
of those learnings.
So there's good templates in Miro and Microsoft Whiteboard.
Of course, it's pretty easy to just do this yourself as well
on a Whiteboard or in PowerPoint.
I will say I've led global teams that are distributed.
So for me, I'm doing all this stuff on Zoom, right?
Or I may have a couple of people in a room and people in Zoom.
So the online tools are something I've relied on heavily
and I still have built kind of that trust
and collaboration in the team.
And then they go back and rely on each other tool,
which is two, which is great because that takes some time.
I'm not needed for all of those conversations.
So stop, start, continue.
Can be really good and as you go through it,
I kind of try to ask the five wise,
what did you learn?
Have we seen that before?
How do we get here and kind of do that from a team level?
Because again, they may have realizations
that they wouldn't say in a one-on-one,
but they hear their colleague,
or they're like, oh yeah, I see that too.
And this is what I've done.
And so it's a great way to kind of capture that information.
Particularly if in your one-on-one,
you're hearing like, oh, this process is really manual,
or this takes me a long time,
or I'm hearing XYZ from customers
and it keeps coming up,
and maybe something's changed in the landscape
and maybe it hasn't, but you're hearing about it more.
So definitely something that I use.
And you can go back to it
if it's on Miro or whiteboard or something,
which is good too.
The other tool, and this one may be new,
and you may have something similar,
if you do, I'd love to hear it.
But climber cards are, like literally it started
like a deck of cards.
And there are physical decks, and I have one,
I'm happy to show you.
And this one is virtual.
So again, I use this with my Zoom meetings.
And this is great in a lot of ways.
So in the virtual world,
you may have a team member that's really quiet
and doesn't speak up.
You may have somebody that speaks up a lot
and takes up a lot of time.
So an online tool,
whether it's start, stop, continue, or something like this,
can really kind of equalize those voices, if you will.
So climber cards have a picture on one side.
They were originally built for team facilitation and meetings.
So on the other side,
they may have a triangle and a number,
or a circle and a number.
And so you can use it to group people in breakouts.
But on the online version,
you can prompt a question.
Somebody picks a card,
and then the answers kind of go to a separate page,
and they can write a description.
So they can just pick a card with their name,
or they can write a description.
And endless possibilities for how you use these.
This deck is picture,
so I know those are really small images,
but it's a lot of technology pictures.
And the prompt on this one is
something you have learned this week.
It could be something that was hard this week.
It could be something fun you did on the weekend.
It could be any number of things.
Again, you put in the prompt as the discussion leader.
And then the other deck, these are drawings.
And I'm no way associated.
I just happen to know that Amy Climbers, who started this,
she was a speaker at TEDx.
She's got a great TEDx talk out there about team collaboration.
But she did these drawings, and again,
you can use this in all kinds of ways.
So the prompt here is select a card
that reminds you of a mistake you made.
I've done these, also a story building.
So another great 80s thing, the Choose Your An Adventures.
Does anybody remember those stories?
Yeah.
And I've done this fun, like if somebody's leaving,
the team, hey, let's pick a card that reminds you
of so-and-so, and then we would tell a story why.
And it could be because something funny
that happened in the office or dinner they went to
or whatever it was, and you kind of work your way through it.
I've also led a discussion that way around,
we had this problem, we have these cards,
and let's weave a story about a different version.
How could that have turned out differently
or a vision that we might want to get to?
So this is a really great tool, I think,
to help lead team discussions.
Again, it equalizes so people have the time
and you can go around and share the story.
If someone is a bit more shy,
they might not be the first one to speak,
but it's gonna come around to them.
I've done this with different frequency in my team,
so it kind of depends on what's going on.
I don't do it every week, sometimes it was monthly,
and sometimes it was, we may do it kind of as needed
depending on what scenario popped up,
but the climber cards, and at first,
the different teams were like, oh boy, what's she doing now?
Yeah, Jessica loves to be creative,
and that's not everybody's wheelhouse, right?
But if you start small, what did you learn this week
or simple, and then the next time you bring it up,
they're more used to seeing it,
and they know everybody's gonna speak,
and so it's not quite as big of a deal.
Again, that's part of that comfortably uncomfortable part
or space, so when you model that,
then they also get used to that as well.
Okay.
Here are just some further discussions,
so again, in ways I've used this toolset,
if something has happened, I'm kind of dealing with it one-on-one,
there may be escalation calls,
internal or with a customer, right?
Going back to the individual that was involved
in the situation, if it was somebody on your team,
could be that you're brought in cross-functionally to collaborate,
and then there is part of this kind of team discussion,
so you may use one of those tools that I just showed,
the climber card or stop, start, continue,
or it may just be kind of more organic
in a regular team meeting, right?
And I have been known to have like my own cheat sheet
of questions or scenarios, right?
So if we're in a meeting, I can look at it
and go through some of those,
but it's all about digging a little bit deeper,
and for me, wanting to hear the feedback of the team,
so it's nice for me to get that input,
and then we can reflect some together,
and then I can take that back.
If I need to bounce ideas off of a leader or someone else,
then I have a kind of broader perspective as well.
So questions here, you know,
kind of how did we get here, why do you think that happened?
Could something have been done differently?
Could we have had a resource or a self-service tool
or something to make a process or scenario more self-service?
Like would that have helped, and the answer may be yes,
and it may be no.
And then also, especially at times,
like maybe there's mid-year review or end-of-year review,
having kind of even the next level up,
so like zooming out, like, what have we learned as a team,
right?
Sometimes we do this in kudos
and share how much we've done, how much we've accomplished,
but we don't always think about how much we've learned,
and that may seem trivial, but it's different, right?
There's activities that we do,
and then there's growth, right?
So maybe it took you three hours previously
to prep for that business review or customer call,
and now you feel more confident,
you know the resources better to go to,
or you have a kind of template,
PowerPoint, whatever it may be,
and you feel good about the flow, right?
That's a learning and maturity
that I think it's worth celebrating too.
So taking the time to kind of ask,
hey, are we more confident because of a mistake we made
or a process that was ripe for mistakes
that we have improved?
And it's just kind of a different lens,
and I do think those sorts of questions,
people really appreciate because if you're a doer
and a helper, which most CSMs, I feel like are, right?
And you're in that mode all the time.
Hearing kudos from customers is cool.
Hearing kudos from teammates and leaders is really nice,
but it's also good to just reflect back and be like,
wow, I have learned a lot, right?
And this is, I'm much more ready to do X,
or I used to be really uncomfortable doing this,
and now I can do it on my own,
or I can teach somebody, right?
That's really cool.
That's how we get not only at built-in culture,
but that's the high-performing piece, right?
As a leader, if I have somebody that could help train
or be a practice sounding board for a newer CSM on an EBR,
for example, that frees up a little bit of my time.
And that is gonna help probably everyone,
'cause as lots of people have mentioned in speaking,
CSMs have a lot on their time,
you leaders have a lot on their play and meetings.
So that's really, I think, what helps lead
to that high-performing.
It's not just the doing, it is the reflecting
and kind of documenting the learnings
and how that happens.
So how did that come from a mistake?
And that was okay, right?
Look where we got, look how much farther along we are.
Okay, so second poll.
Again, the mistake types we talked about
were sloppy, that's typically not focused.
The aha, where something good actually did happen,
but you're not sure why,
and we need to think about that.
The stretch mistakes would be similar
to stretch assignments,
where we're pushing the boundaries
for somebody, could be ourselves.
And we might expect that they encounter scenarios
they don't know what to do,
and a mistake might happen,
and then high-stakes mistakes.
I had no idea how this one was gonna turn out,
so I'm super excited, you guys are answering that.
(laughs)
Yeah, yeah.
This is fun, so I love that people are saying
these kind of the frameworks,
so whether it's start, stop, continue, discussion questions,
a tool like Climber Card could help with stretch mistakes.
Again, for me, that's the fun stuff,
whether it's a new situation I'm in,
so if I'm trying to build scale,
or I'm leading a team in a new area,
whatever that may be,
it can help your own framework
and what you wanna put in place.
The aha and sloppy mistakes too.
I think the reflection of it,
and being able,
maybe it's calling out awareness for individual sloppy mistakes,
a lot of times people recognize themselves,
they may not wanna fess up about it,
but they often know aha mistakes,
sometimes people don't know,
and as a leader, I think,
and sometimes it's teammates are peers,
if they have a buddy system or a mentor,
they might notice some kind of pattern
that can lead to learning like an aha mistake,
so I think it's really neat to think
how these kind of tool sets or framework
can really help you in those scenarios
and help the individuals themselves, honestly.
Okay, oh, I went backwards, there we go.
Okay, so,
I want to kind of wrap up my part,
and then I think we'll have a fair amount of time
for questions around sharing a story.
It's one of those that you never really want to see happen,
but earlier this year,
at least that's how I felt when it happened,
earlier this year I got a chat message from a CSM,
and sometimes you can even tell there's panic
in the message when you're not talking to somebody,
and we were kind of talking back and forth,
and then we hopped on a Zoom,
and sure enough, this person felt like
they had probably given a customer and partner
of ours incorrect information, not intentional, right?
They thought they had the right answer,
but the information they shared was actually incorrect,
so this is one of those mistake types
you kind of instantly feel sick in your stomach
when you realize that it has happened,
and so I got that chat message and like, okay,
we explored a little and looked,
and I was like, yep, I unfortunately think you're right,
that we shared the wrong information,
and so the immediate action is like,
what mitigation can we do now
to help get back on the right track, right?
Like that's the first thing you're doing.
The next thing that I'm doing in this scenario,
there were kind of two CSMs involved,
and it's like, okay, let me hear what happened
as those one-on-one conversations,
give them some time to share their feelings, all right?
That's part of the awkward silence
that often in these kind of scenarios,
what comes back is like, oh yeah, I'm scared,
or I didn't want to mess up or whatever that may be,
but talking through that,
and really understanding the sequence of events,
so I had the context, so I could share,
really factually, right?
Again, I'm a big believer in not pointing fingers and blame,
so I could share factually and let my leaders know,
hey, this happened, I want you to be aware of it,
and kind of here's where we are.
Also don't know at this point in time
how soon you're gonna be able to resolve that situation, right?
So there's a lot of uncertainty for the individual,
for the, in this case, the team,
'cause there were a couple of people involved,
in scenarios like this,
how come that news flies really fast, right?
Like something good may happen,
and it may be a month before everybody on the team knows,
but if something like this happens,
often everybody knows really quickly, right?
So there's uncertainty in the team,
like, oh, how bad is this, or what's gonna happen?
And then I don't know how we're gonna work through this
and resolve it.
So this is where that kind of parallel action
was taking place, so I was working through that one on one,
we were having escalation calls,
but also in the next team meeting,
we just addressed it,
and we started talking through,
kind of, hey, is what could there have been
a different way to approach this,
or something that could have prevented that?
So kind of immediately have starting
those team conversations.
Somehow that helps take away
that some of the mystery and like the shame,
like what's gonna happen, right?
'Cause you're just talking about it.
You're really normalizing something that happened,
and normalizing mistakes help make it less scary, right?
So when something is normalized,
it becomes, it just becomes a part of the norm.
I think that's what normalized means.
So talking about it is a great way to have that.
And then if you have a framework,
then you can kind of work through it,
and somebody said muscle memory in an earlier session,
it really kind of is that, oh, we've done this before.
Okay, we're gonna talk through this and see what happens.
So in the end, we did work through the situation,
which was great, but at the mid-year review,
the way we do mid-year reviews,
we have the employee answer some questions
and summary and then the manager does as well,
then they talk about it.
And so you do that kind of in a vacuum, right?
So they can write up their answers,
and then you read through them.
And then we were in a discussion.
And this particular CSM said,
not only had they learned,
they said that they felt supported through the process,
they knew they were in the right role at the right company.
And for me, that was a huge win.
So that's it.
(audience applauding)
- All right, thank you, Jessica.
Right, we're gonna take some questions now.
Okay, first one, could you share an example
where a high impact mistake surprisingly led
to a significant positive shift in strategy or approach?
- So yes, I have an example of this too.
Unfortunately, we have a fairly manual process
where if something happens like a customer could go down,
it's never a good situation, right?
And so we were talking through this
and one of the things that we always say is like,
can you need to triple check
and does every line item match?
And it's all this stuff that's really manual
and right for error.
And someone, it was not me, someone on the team
had a brilliant idea, like, could somebody write a script
and look at that?
Like, could somebody on the tech side just,
does this equal that?
And sure enough, we asked and they wrote it
and it's now part of our process.
Huge, it's so much less stressful,
so we still have to do the manual process,
but it's so much less stressful for the team.
Yeah, and the tech people didn't mind at all,
like, so happy to help.
Awesome, okay, this is an interesting one.
What's the best way to tell your boss
that you've made a mistake?
Like, if anyone wants to put their hand up
and say you asked that question, then don't be shy,
I'm joking.
- I would say quickly.
I appreciate knowing about it fast.
I don't, you know, I think some of that depends
on the relationship with your manager.
Are they in the same geographic region and time zone?
Are they in the same office or, you know,
but I tend to, whether it's something I had done
and I wanted to share it with my manager
or something that I was sharing up to leadership,
like the last example, like, hey, FYI, here's the heads up.
If you hear about this, I can give you more,
but this is where we are and here's my next action.
So I try and keep it simple and let them know
that I'm thinking about it.
- Consize and factual.
Awesome, okay.
How do you approach situations where a team member
repeatedly makes similar mistakes
while keeping the conversation constructive?
- Yeah, that's a hard one, right?
You start getting into maybe performance
and that's likely one of those sloppy mistake areas, right?
This is where I think that human first approach
can really help and it's like,
Harry, I've noticed that you've been late to meetings lately.
- Sorry about that.
- Is there something going on?
You know, we really start on time
'cause we have limited and then I'm quiet.
That's the awkward silence and I just wait
and you know, you learn a lot
and it is often something personal
that somebody has going on that they hadn't shared yet
is what I've learned, yeah.
- Embrace the silence.
Okay, how do you coach someone through a mistake
to support their growth?
- Great question.
So in that last example with the CSM,
I kept that CSM with me through the escalation.
There were multiple reasons, I did that,
but showing up and standing up with them and for them
but also I think a takeaway was they realized that like,
hey, it wasn't so bad and that they could do this
and then again, they said they were supported,
which was great.
But I think it's also for me that having the one on one
and then also talking about it contextually as a team.
- Okay, Gura has the next question.
What if the mistake is being done by someone from another team
that then has a big impact for you?
How do you address that?
- Yeah, that can be hard too, right?
I try and understand the context, right?
Get that kind of, do I know the facts?
And then I typically have had a one on one conversation
in my case, it's usually with my counterpart, a manager.
So an individual contributor may have made a mistake
somewhere else that impacted
and I'll reach out to my counterpart.
- Awesome.
Embracing mistakes is definitely a good thing
but how do you ensure a team doesn't get complacent
in an environment where there is less accountability
for their actions?
- Yeah, it's a good question.
And in my experience, they don't actually feel less accountable.
Like they realize they can do it right
and perform at that kind of higher level.
So, but I'd be happy to hear more
about the concern and context of your question.
In high stakes projects or high pressure periods,
how do you reassure your team that it's safe
to experiment and potentially make those mistakes?
- Yeah.
So probably the first thing I did, like way back
before that employee said it's okay to make mistakes
and they felt comfortable doing that
is I was one of those leaders that said,
it's okay to make mistakes,
but there wasn't necessarily a lot of substance behind that
but I do think stating that makes sense
and if you can never share a story yourself.
The intern example, so they were like an engineering intern
and I think sometimes innovation in those areas,
it's more common to have that as part of culture.
It's like less common in CS 'cause we're customer facing
and we should have the right answers all the time
and you just don't necessarily.
- So I think it's all about reassuring
and how you show up and kind of talk about it.
Mistakes are really learning.
So some of it's how you frame it with the team.
- In your opinion, when does a mistake become negligence
and should be sanctioned?
- Yeah, I think in my notes I have something on this
and I didn't actually say it.
So even sloppy mistakes, like I'm not okay with misspellings
like I expect my team to be professional
and to show up on time to your meetings, Harry
and whatever that may be.
So I think some of that is setting the standard
and being clear about that with the team.
- Okay, question here from Christian.
How do you establish a common understanding in your team
about what a mistake actually is?
- Yeah, that's a good to go at the last one.
I think some of that is having standards and expectations.
So people can't read my mind, they can't read your mind, right?
If it's company culture that meetings start five minutes late
but you know your team has back to back
or you have back to back and you need to start on time,
you need to say that.
So, and I think that's true with other things
like mistakes as well.
Asking for help would be another.
Like it's okay to make mistakes.
I also encourage questions all the time.
Ask for help, ask your peers, ask me,
grab 15 minutes on my calendar.
- Okay, we're gonna take a final question now.
How do you propose that this mindset
be implemented in the wider company culture?
- That's a really good question.
- Yeah, I don't know that I have an answer for that
except I would say working with your peers in counterparts.
And honestly, I don't even think you need to be
a people leader to make happen.
If you work in a team or are a leader in that way,
the more you model a behavior,
the more it tends for other people to follow.
So I think I would work with counterparts
and try and share the benefit.
- Okay, thank you, Jessica.
You really did share some crucial insights
for human first leaders, so thank you.
As I mentioned at the beginning,
you will be able to access Jessica's slides
and the audio recording from today in the Pulse Library.
Go check that out in a couple of weeks time.
And also please do complete the breakout session survey
within the Pulse app and let Jessica know
your feedback from her session.
You could win a 50 euro Amazon voucher.
You've now got 15 minutes to get
to your final session of the day.
Grab a coffee, take a selfie before you head home.
I hope you've had many new human first connections
over the past two days and had a memorable
Pulse Europe experience.
We'll see you in Dublin next year,
but please give a huge round of applause for Jessica.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you.
(audience chattering)
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