“What did you learn?”
When something bad happens to someone (firing, demotion, bad review, big failure), it’s natural for managers to ask that person “what did you learn?“*
Unfortunately the answer is rarely what a manager wants to hear, and it’s also largely useless.**
Asking the question phrases it as the employee’s problem, while theory and experience both tell us that it’s far more often the management that is at primary fault (work environment, culture, all sorts of common cause variation. It is not at all useful to ask the employee “what did you learn?” unless the goal of the question is a) pure personal curiousity, as when family/friends/coworkers ask, or b) to get the employee’s take on how to improve the system so these things don’t happen.
Are we masters of our own destiny? I find thinking so is a useful way to behave personally, but a naive or dishonest way to lead and manage. If you believe that an employee is the primary driver of their behavior, rather than the system he or she works in, then you’re probably relying on destiny to create a successful company. Good luck! You may also consider playing the lottery.***
Unless you can reliably improve and grow the system and culture, you are relying on luck, timing, and personal attributes to create a successful organization. That’s fine, but very few managers would admit to wanting such a company. An event that disrupts or upsets an employee is a great opportunity to learn, so here are some better questions to ask your employee when it happens. (for clarity, I will use “we” for management and “you” for employee)
Better questions to ask your employee
What can we learn from this? I assume we think highly of our employee (we hired them****, or at least haven’t fired them before this). They probably have the best view of what went right and wrong. And if not the best view, then at least a unique one worth hearing. We have as much to learn as they do. After all, we- the manager, employee, and probably many other connected people- failed.
What do you think caused this? Your employee fell victim to the system. The difficult part is figuring out what parts of the system were the aggressors. Remember, even if this were truly their fault, our organization can’t grow from finding the employee at fault, so it behooves us to find something we can learn from.
Were you surprised? When people take risks, they expect to lose part of the time. The employee’s failure may not be due to a mistake, but a calculated risk that didn’t work out. This fundamentally changes what the “learning” is about. Let’s not presume bad outcomes were due to a lack of understanding or miscalculation on the part of the employee, but rather assume bad outcomes are due to a shortcoming in our management and the system.
Why were we surprised at the outcome? Why didn’t we see this coming? If we did see it coming, why didn’t we act earlier? Maybe your employee can help you learn to see this happening earlier next time, so you can do something about it. Or maybe you were warned about it, but saw what you wanted to see, and your employee can help you realize that.
What would “success” have looked like? Some situations are “unwinnable.” There war is lost, but the employee still believes there is hope. Find out what they were fighting for. You can make sure others that are fighting for the same cause don’t meet the same fate, either because you fix the issue, or do a better job explaining it.
There are many other good questions that should be asked. Big “failures” are great opportunities to learn, so let the discussion flow. You won’t learn and grow as an organization if your default response is to blame the employee. Every time someone gets a bad review, is fired, quits, or royally messes up, we must use that opportunity to improve as an organization.
*: I will state so there’s no confusion: I’m not talking about the words themselves. I’m talking about the idea that you are asking the employee what they learned as the primary way to involve them in the retrospection of “their” significant failure.
**: Usually what the employee probably thinks is you’re an asshole, the culture is broken, and the organization is fucked. So I spend this article focusing on why the question is useless.
***: I don’t worry about offending people here, because no one ever thinks they’re a bad manager. And you certainly aren’t!
****: I use ‘they’ or ‘their’ instead of “he or she” or “s/he” or whatever. I’m not sure what is in vogue today.
> Every time someone gets a bad review, is fired, quits, or royally messes up, we must use that opportunity to improve as an organization.
I’m sure many people, especially managers will agree with this piece of common sense, and then do something totally different in practice. Introspection can hurt. Changing your process takes time, and effort. Firing the “incompatible” employee and replacing him with a conforming one is much easier. Nevermind that, as a company, you are BSing yourself about the efficiency of your processes, if operating like this becomes a norm for your business. Especially in games, where there’s a steady supply of eager (and sometimes naive) people, this seems to be the easy way out. Forced ranking support this even by putting the blame on the employees – a certain number of people are just considered low performers. When your whole evaluation system is based on this, you become blind to looking anywhere else for causes of failure. It’s the people. And they are replaceable. Welcome to the industry!
I would another questiona here, which seems the most critical to me:
– With new knowledge|experience you have now, how would you do similar task in future?
It’s sad, but number of times after getting the answer on this question, I had to make a decision to fire or to move employee to other departament.
Dmitry, isn’t that question just another form of “What did you learn?”
Robert: I think it’s safe to say “naive.” I once (2008?) got into an internet argument with a 3d artist who had just entered the industry. He said he would work for $10 an hour to get into the industry. He sent me an email a couple years later apologizing for the argument, saying I was right all along. He had lost his job shortly after our argument to someone younger and willing to work for less than he was, and he was still out of work. At least he learned a valuable lesson!
Rob: for me it’s not just another form of question since when you ask “What did you learn?”, person will say smth like “I have to be more careful with planning, notify my lead about delays ASAP and etc”. Mentaly, the answer is some set of proper phrases, nothing else. Question”How would you act?” is way more open, and you and employee together can work out a proper way to solve these kind of problems. In fact, you can guide employee to find process you want on his own, with a very little help of you as supervisor.
As for replaceable employees – yes, they are replaceable. It’s not easy at all for both management and employees, but when people can’t be fired, at some point they start to perform really bad since there’s no difference between doing good and bad.
As for working for $10 – noone has promised yet, that working in gamedevelopment as a developer will make you rich and happy. Come on, we are having fun, doing what we like, making and playing games all the time. Why should we be paid for that more than minimal acceptable|possible? It’s not just in gamedev, it’s everywhere where amount of open positions is less than amount of those, who are trying to get one.
Btw, notifications about new comments don’t work. I’m subscribed, but have got no email on your comment. May be, it works only on post update?
Update – it seems like following now works. I have just recieved confirmation email on that.
Dmitry, wasn’t Rob’s entire point in this blog post that the organization shouldn’t interrogate the employee even if it is categorically their fault? That a failure is a learning experience for the manager, the organisation and the employee.
To me at least asking leading questions rather than being direct about what you expect just looks manipulative and cowardly. If anything it seems more like a way for the manager to make themselves feel clever than to actually encourage any kind of open dialogue. After all it might be the process itself that was at fault!
You want to pay people well because you want people to be worrying about the product you are trying to make rather than worrying about how to increase their meager pay packet. Similar is true for other extrinsic rewards as they tend to have a deleterious effect on creative output.
Charles, I don’t know why you treat asking a question as “interrogation”. For me it really depends on the way you ask and the quiestion itself, not just a fact of the question. Same goes to your point about “just looks manipulative and cowardly”.
Another not 100% clear point here is: “After all it might be the process itself that was at fault!”. People do mistakes (both managers and developers), sometimes just because they are wrong, not the whole system. I may be wrong, but it seems like you try to say that employee just can’t fail on his own, while I fairly believe each person can.
As for being direct – have you tried to be direct on your own as manager? I had, and it seems like people tend to treat this way of expressing thoughts as direct orders with no option to argue or say anything. While asking a question is a way to see/hear what a person thinks about the situation.
As for paying and worring about the product – the best guys I’ve seen is the industry never been paid too much, while they are thinking about their products all the time. I doubt if it’s possible to make them think more about product by adding extra money since their motivation is laying in different plane. Though I would be happy to see higher salaries and world happiness everywhere possible.
My point is more that failure happens and that assuming the failure was only with the employee and that the employee is the thing that needs to be fixed or replaced is often wrong. Rob says as much above:
“Asking the question phrases it as the employee’s problem, while theory and experience both tell us that it’s far more often the management that is at primary fault (work environment, culture, all sorts of common cause variation.”
Companies are composed of individuals working in concert within the context of their working environment which is typically setup by a bunch of other people. As such it’s exceedingly unlikely that an individual failed in isolation.
I’m happy to be honest and direct with anyone. You can have a conversation with people about a process without having to have the other person practice their mind-reading skills to guess what you are asking them to say. It basically becomes a game to say the right thing to make the awkward conversation end. Which is what you’re asking them to do, “you and employee together can work out a proper way to solve these kind of problems. In fact, you can guide employee to find process you want on his own, with a very little help of you as supervisor”.
The reason for the word interrogate is it best describes the tenor the question you suggested sets up. It’s the employees fault alone, everything else is perfect and we’re going to fix/fire you. A better word to describe what I think should be happening is debrief. Let’s look at the situation dispassionately in the whole to really identify what went wrong and how we can avoid it in the future. That’s why the questions Rob suggests are on the whole better. They don’t automatically assume fault and treat the employee as an equal partner in diagnosing and at least suggesting treatment.
On the wages thing I’m saying you need to pay people enough so that money isn’t something they are worrying about. I absolutely agree that the best motivation is intrinsic to the work being done. Paying the absolute minimum is not very resilient in that context.
Charles, I see your point and it seems like we are on the page. Probably, language barrier (I’m Russian) doesn’t allow me to explain my vision on more clear way.
I don’t want to argue anymore since there’s nothing to argue about. I’ll just to point that quiestion “How would you act?” in my case is a way to start conversation. Employee can highlight problems he see in the environment, in managers, leads, supervisors etc. During same conversation you as manager can explain, why process is set up in the way it is, as well as discuss all the suggestions.
Fair enough and sorry if I’ve misinterpreted what you’ve said previously!