Failing up

Apparently my earlier posts on mediocre hires in education and the re-appearing of poor teachers may have hit a nerve. Today, I was sent a somewhat academic discussion of the phenomenon in the real world.

According to the BBC piece, failing up or "landing successively sweeter gigs even after professional mediocrity or missteps" in and of itself may not be bad as some of these people actually do well, What is problematic is the gap between those who fail on their way up and those who do have the same opportunity.

The writer goes on to discuss reasons, and of course recruitment and selection are key factors here. Possibly the main point concerns the nature of failure and assert that, 

"failing at work, when it’s the result of a professional misstep and not a moral one – such as sexual harassment, racism or generally making your employees miserable – is necessary and can be critical to good leadership in the future. People can often learn the greatest lessons from having to pick themselves up again after a poor performance, difficult challenge or blunder on the job."

I find this interesting. Firstly of course, this would suggest risk-taking and risk-taking is essential to creativity and to entrepreneurialism. At the same time, risk-taking can be careless or cavalier or dangerous. Failure at a hurdle in the park has a very different outcome from failure by leaving the path at Yellowstone.

Secondly, this suggests that those who learn from their failures are those who fail up and yet many of those who are over-promoted do not only miss that class, they often go on to repeat the same failures. My neighbor told me of a business he knows where the marketing manager failed sideways to become operational manager and then failed sideways to become direct sales manager and has now failed sideways again to become manager of online services provision. (The prevailing theory is that he is the illegitimate son of the board president.)

I find this troubling in terms of education because of the real and direct effects on students and on our future. We know that students can recover from one bad year but not from two, so a mid-level or senior failure can be devastating. We can see evidence of this in the effects and results of various policies adopted by federal and state governments over the years.

Learning from one's mistakes is critical to development, and of course to skills acquisition and to learning in general. Not all mistakes are benign, and failing up in education can result in our students not only failing themselves, but not even having the opportunity to succeed. 

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Further reading

"Failing Up" : why some climb the ladder despite mediocrity