The Myth of the Nice Girl by Fran Hauser

Author:Fran Hauser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Failure, Confidence, and Risk

Obviously, making the decision to shut down StyleFind did not end up destroying my career, as I’d feared. In fact, I recall one senior executive saying to me, “No one bats a thousand. Failure comes with the territory.” But when it happens, it can really shake your confidence. Understandably, we often interpret a serious setback as evidence of our inability to lead, and that makes us feel insecure.

It’s interesting to note how women in particular react to failure. The Harvard Business Review found that women were far less likely to apply for a leadership role if they had been turned down for a similar role in the past. Over time, this is undoubtedly one of the factors keeping women out of senior management roles. How can we become more comfortable risking failure and rejection?

In their book Art & Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland tell a story about a ceramics teacher who conducted an experiment. He divided a beginner’s pottery class in half and told the people on one side that they’d be graded on quantity. The more pots they produced, the better their grade would be. Then he told the other half that they’d be graded on quality. The more perfect their pot, the better their grade would be.

Guess which group made better pots? The one that was focused on quantity. Why? Because they practiced. Because they failed. And they ultimately improved their technique through trial and error. The group that was hung up on perfection never took risks, so they never failed, and, as a result, they never learned or improved.

I recently heard that 80% of women CEOs played team sports in high school and college. This data made perfect sense to me. In playing a team sport, women learn how not to take the team’s success or failure personally. You win some, you lose some, and then you get back out there on the field the next day. Doing this over and over clearly gave those women CEOs the resilience they needed to catapult themselves to the top.

Even if you think it’s too late for you to join a varsity soccer team, it’s never too late to learn how to cultivate the confidence to take risks. I recently helped a woman I mentor named Kathryn make a big decision about whether or not to take a risk in her career. Kathryn worked as a pharmaceutical sales representative and was offered a job as a sales manager. It was a promotion with a significant salary increase, but it meant moving from Chicago, where she lived with her husband and son, to North Carolina.

Kathryn and I walked through the potential risks. Her son had special needs, so it was important to find the right school for him. She felt that disrupting him when he was doing well in school was a big risk. Kathryn’s husband worked for the same company she did, and they had offered him a position in North Carolina, too, so his job wasn’t at stake.

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