Meet intrepid entrepreneurs from Africa and South Asia, hear their stories of trial & triumph, and gain insights and guidance from Stanford University faculty and global business experts on how to transform today’s challenges into tomorrow’s opportunities.
From securing investment and planning family succession, to mindful leadership and managing in adversity, you’ll learn firsthand from entrepreneurs and experts on how to develop the grit you need to grow your business — in times of crisis and calm. Walk away with actionable information, new perspectives, and fresh inspiration to take your business to the next level.
Listeners can also take a deep dive into entrepreneurship with masterclass episodes featuring interviews with Stanford faculty and global experts. It’s a unique opportunity to hear about cutting-edge research, get practical business tips, and learn proven leadership strategies from some of the world’s leading thinkers and practitioners.
Grit & Growth is brought to you by Stanford Seed, a Stanford Graduate School of Business-led initiative that partners with entrepreneurs in emerging markets to build thriving enterprises that transform lives.
About The Host:
Darius Teter is executive director of Stanford Seed, a Stanford Graduate School of Business-led initiative that partners with entrepreneurs in emerging markets to build thriving enterprises that transform lives. Darius has held leadership positions at Oxfam America, the Asian Development Bank and with the US Government where his experience included advising governments on economic policy, developing human rights programming, and financing infrastructure megaprojects across Africa, Asia and Latin America. All the while, he remained intrigued by the human experience and our universal drive towards growth and prosperity.
Welcome to Grit & Growth’s masterclass on growth mindset and psychological safety and how they can empower employees to speak up, fail fast, and fail smart — with accountability but not retribution. Sarah Soule, Stanford Graduate School of Business professor in organizational behavior, has tips and tricks for leaders to help build a culture that encourages healthy debate and out-of-the-box thinking.
Failure happens … whether you like it or not. Yet, almost every entrepreneur would agree that learning the right way to fail is what enables businesses to succeed. But how do you create an environment where people aren’t afraid to fail? According to Professor Soule, it all starts with building an environment of psychological safety: a climate where people feel comfortable sharing their ideas and concerns and speaking up when needed without being judged or viewed negatively by the leaders when they do.
Soule encourages leaders to remember that all humans make mistakes. And in some types of work, failure is actually part of the process. However, failure is not a luxury every organization has — especially in health care — so she recommends simulating failure instead. The key, she explains, is that when we make mistakes, we learn from them and don’t hide them. Otherwise, they’re likely to snowball into bigger mistakes. “One of the elements of psychological safety is that people on a team don't hide their mistakes. They also feel comfortable and safe to challenge their superiors, to challenge their colleagues, when they see something is about to go amiss,” she says.
5 Masterclass Takeaways
Not all mistakes are the same.
Soule encourages everyone to “distinguish between mistakes that are made that should have been preventable — because somebody has been inattentive or has been sloppy or has just been going rogue — versus smart failure.”
Try to learn from failure.
“When and if we do fail or fall short of what we hoped, we can learn from it. That can only happen if the team feels like it is okay to bring forward these possibilities without you judging them or firing them because they're challenging you. It’s not who failed. No blaming. But why did we fail? And what can we learn from that?” she says.
Walk the walk. Talk the talk.
Soule advises leaders to align their actions and values. “I think one of the things that's very important, particularly for a new leader in an established organization, is to come in right away and express what the values and expectations of the culture are going to be, and then to continually repeat them, and demonstrate that it’s what the leader believes.”
Strike a balance between acceptance and accountability.
Soule says, “Leaders actually really need to distinguish between those two and not just celebrate all failure. There's got to be some accountability, right? When we have made mistakes that should have been preventable, we do need to hold people accountable for that.”
Pre-mortems can be a safe way to simulate failure.
“Pre-mortems are a structured but simple way to bring the whole team together to pretend that something has failed massively,” Soule explains. “Think very hard about what were the reasons for this failure and then brainstorm ways that those reasons could be averted as a way to prevent the failure from happening.”
Listen to Sarah Soule’s evidence, advice, and strategies for how to leverage psychological safety to increase team performance, productivity, and innovation by failing in the right way.
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