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Who?

Elena Krutova, a distinguished Human Resources Director with more than 18 years of experience in companies around the world, including Kaspersky Lab, IBM, Inchcape, Bureau Veritas and Exness, shares her experience.

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Defining failure

FuN: What's your personal definition of failure?

Elena: Failure is when you give up on a problem and let it go without learning a lesson on how to do better next time. Failure is our stubbornness in admitting our own imperfections and accepting that we all learn through mistakes. Failure is not a mistake or something we handle the wrong way; on the contrary, failure is our weakness in not trying again and again until we get better results. Failure is not falling down, failure is refusing to get up!

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The Real F*up 💩

Elena: One of the most painful recent failures was when we selected the wrong learning and development software for a company of more than 1500 people, and many months later we realized that the project was not going well.

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The features we expected were not working properly, and the vendor was not very helpful. It was very painful to admit that we were wrong to choose the wrong company, and the deeper we got into the project, the harder it was to stop it.

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FuN: What were the key decisions that led to the failure?

Elena: Every experienced project manager knows that you cannot get the best and highest quality product at the lowest price. This was our crucial mistake: expecting the best product at the lowest price, all at once. So when we were in the process of acquiring the e-learning platform, we focused too much on the price, ignoring the potential risks associated with the product. Which, by the way, was not properly tested.

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On short-term objectives‍.

‍Elena: The company was doing very well financially; however, there was always pressure to reduce costs. Our goal was to find the solution that outperformed other options in terms of price. When you go through complex procurement procedures, you always want to show a sense of economy and savings. In some cases, you may later face that by saving now, you pay a lot more in the future. And this was our case.

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FuNCan you identify any warning signs that they may have missed?

Elena: The first was when we signed the contract and paid the main invoice. The interest from the supplier changed immediately, and that's when I knew... the project was in trouble. Then, as our requests became more and more complicated, we realized that our needs were not being met as they should be. Finally, I realized that we needed to rethink the whole strategy when it was too late.

In our case, all these warning signs were present, but we were overly optimistic, or even naïve, thinking we could handle it all.

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FuN: How did this failure contribute to your personal and professional growth?

Elena: With every failure I learn to understand and manage myself better.

I realized that my focus on getting quick results could cause additional stress to my team. So instead of addressing problems openly, they could hide them for fear of disappointing me. So now I give my team members more space to analyze how projects are going. That way, they can spot early warning signs themselves and be able to address them in time.

Giving a safe space for team members to express themselves is the best thing any manager can do, and I've learned that through my failures.

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Sharing the Failure

FuNDid you share the lessons internally, and what was the reaction of the people involved?‍

Elena: Several parties were involved in our project, so they all saw that something was wrong. When we finally stopped and cancelled the project, there was also a sense of relief in the organization, to stop wasting our resources on something that wasn't working.

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We also had internal "lessons learned" and "post mortem" sessions to make sure we all understood the reasons why it happened, and to do our best to avoid similar situations in the future.

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In conclusion...

• Identify if there are biases in our decisions by seeking outside opinions on the subject.
• When analyzing the feasibility of a project we have to remove the initial costs and the emotional investment, in short, remove the optimism and focus on the expected objectives.
• Rarely will the team proactively raise their hands in the face of imminent risks (no one wants to be the spoilsport), we need to make sure we have the space to talk about the tough stuff.

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