There have been whispers in the press for a while now about Google X, a secretive underground Google laboratory where the search giant’s most compelling innovations have been dreamed up. But now a new secret is leaking out of that lair, and it has a lot to do with why Google is so good at big, bold ideas. Apparently, the company encourages its employees to come up with bad ideas. In fact, it rewards them when they fail.
Startups, we know, often believe in failing fast. And for the CEOs and corner-office types, a bit of risk and adrenaline can feel healthy. But while failure is glorified for founders, few companies encourage – or even tolerate – it amongst employees.
For the average employee, who is much more concerned about a monthly salary than about a potential exit, failure can be terrifying. It means losing face in front of your boss and your colleagues, and sometimes it means termination. This no-failure culture means that when a brainstorming session happens, lips would rather be sealed than reputations risked.
But failure has immense value.
At ClickTale, where I serve as Chief Marketing Officer, I’ve been encouraging my employees to fail for a while now. After all, the only way to dig up gems is to plow through a bit of dirt.
I encourage my team to stop worrying about failure, and I offer rewards and encouragement for bad ideas, which require bravery, boldness, and that crucial element, out-of-the-box thinking.
It’s a strategy of “fail so that you can win.” If I am in a brainstorming session with my team and I hear one of my employees offer up a fringe idea --- one that causes sighs or giggles because it’s so different or radical or seemingly impossible --- I will make sure everyone there, including his superiors, knows how grateful I am that the employee was willing to pipe up and put it out there. And if we decide to invest time and money in a marketing strategy, and we spend several months following its protocol only to realize at the end that it has crashed and burned, I will single out the employee who dreamed up that dud plan and tell everyone, publicly, just how grateful I am that we fell flat on our face. Because I’ve learned to see the forest and ignore the trees, and I know that this spectacular flop was just the first step in a leap toward something much better in the long run.
“But wait!” You might say. “If you heap praise on employees who fail, don’t you run the risk of just rewarding bad work and allowing your employees to lapse into laziness?”
To which I would simply respond: “If you can’t trust your employees, is that their fault or yours?”
If you’ve hired good people and created a culture of creativity and competence, encouraging failure will do nothing but bring you success. It will push those who work alongside you to dig deeper and think harder, and it will offer the most crucial brainstorming tool of all --- a safety net beneath bad ideas --- to keep the innovation-paralyzing emotions of fear, anxiety, and shame at bay.
You can gauge failure any way you like, but I prefer to keep an informal tally. All of my employees, I feel, should be failing about 1 in 4 times. So if over a quarter they offer me one idea per month, and not a single one of those ideas ends up stinking like yesterday’s trash, I am going to start getting suspicious that their so-called “good” ideas were really just mediocre proposals dressed up in fancy clothes.
In short, employees who never fail are probably playing it too safe. They can do better. But the only way to push them there is to aggressively force them out of their comfort zone. To do that, you have to make it okay for them to take risks.
You can reward failure any way you like. I prefer simple praise, done in public and in the presence of coworkers and superiors. Financial incentives, bonuses, and special privileges doled out to employees who are bold enough to fail are also great options. It’s up to you, depending on your company and the culture of your workplace.
But the bottom line is that those who don’t strive will never reach true greatness. And the road to greatness is paved with failures. Embrace them. Encourage them. Your employees --- and your bottom line --- will thank you.
Efrat Ravid leads worldwide marketing initiatives for ClickTale. Previous to ClickTale, she led the global marketing efforts at ClickSoftware, managed the global marketing team at Sophos, an IT security company, and held various technical and product-related roles at Dassault Systèmes SolidWorks, a 3D CAD Software Company.