Adopting healthy habits – failing and asking for help 

The number one question that I’ve asked people, thousands of them, is: “What’s stopping you from doing good work?” It sounds like a simple question, and it is in some ways, but you get some really interesting answers. It gets people thinking about what good work is, what it looks like, and where the blockers are lurking. So much comes out of that one question.

It’s not a question people are used to being asked. On the whole, organizations expect people to come to work, perform the tasks assigned to them and then clock off, job done. The prevailing culture is: this is your job, don’t deviate from it, don’t ask any searching questions and don’t offer any ideas. And if people do try anything that’s out of the scope of their work, they get their knuckles rapped for not seeking approval, even if they’re on the right track. It’s very unhealthy.

And it doesn’t stop there. In these unhealthy workplaces (and there are a lot of them), where people are expected to just do the job, what happens if they don’t know something? If something doesn’t make sense? Or there’s a recurrent problem that needs addressing? People keep their head down and plough on. The culture is such that they don’t want to admit that they don’t know. They don’t want to ask for help so they pretend it isn’t happening. And they certainly don’t want to say if anything goes wrong or they make a mistake. It is easier to deflect the blame elsewhere rather than seek support.

But we all learn from mistakes. We try something and sometimes we fail and then we try again. And we maintain that cycle of trying and learning and trying and learning until we succeed. We’ve been doing it since we were born, but in the workplace, that is problematic.

Working under this kind of pressure is hugely stressful for people, not to mention the negative impact on performance, productivity and innovation. It stops colleagues trusting one another. Fear is toxic and if nobody acknowledges that something hasn’t worked or isn’t working, it makes it very hard to turn the situation around.

Yet it happens all the time. People cover mistakes up or they direct the blame on to someone else, who is then forced to carry the can if they cannot sidestep responsibility. And there is no shared learning, so nothing improves.

This makes workplaces really unhealthy and toxic and it means that in a lot of organizations, people are essentially wearing masks. They are pretending to be more competent or confident than they are because admitting they don’t know something would be seen as a sign of weakness or incompetence.

This is the complete opposite of a learning organization. In learning organizations, it’s okay to admit you don’t know something, or to ask for help, or to say that an experiment failed. In learning organizations, people learn from mistakes, and they learn from and with each other. People share information, knowledge and experiences willingly, without fear of repercussion. And it means people can do good work. Working practices can be improved. Innovation can flourish. Problems are surfaced and tackled. And people are happier, more engaged and more fulfilled in their work. This is so much healthier – for individuals and for organizations – than when people hide in their roles and just do what is required.

It is so important that people are encouraged to do good work and are encouraged to be curious. Curiosity is a natural human attribute, but it doesn’t appear to be valued in most workplaces.

What can L&D do to encourage healthy workplaces and healthy habits? They need to do some fieldwork, starting with that all important question –  “What is stopping you from doing good work?” They will be overwhelmed by the answers, I guarantee you, although many of the problems, the barriers preventing people from doing good work, will have nothing to do with learning.

The barriers will be around processes and systems and culture. “I’m not allowed to make decisions on x” or “No-one asks for my input” or “There are so many levels of approval, and it takes so long to get the necessary people to look at anything.” And so on.

L&D needs to identify and understand the underlying problems that hold people and organizations back. Trust is a key issue in many organizations – if people don’t feel trusted to do good work and to make their own decisions, they will shut down. And if they don’t trust the organization, they won’t ask for help or admit it when things go wrong (everyone makes mistakes, even those at the top….) because they think they will be punished and that it will be career limiting. Trust is fundamental to build healthy working practices but it is often absent.

The next webinar in my series on Organizational Learning: Reimagined and Redefined for our time, is called Adopting healthy habits – failing and asking for help. In it we will discuss the above, as well as sharing case studies of organizations that aren’t healthy or toxic. We will explore the importance of healthy habits, looking at:

• why fear is always toxic
• that mistakes are massive learning opportunities
• that being able to ask for help is at the heart of a coaching culture
• that open discussion is the root of innovation and resilience

Sign up to the webinar here.