The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  After the papers were returned, the students had the option to revise and resubmit their paper in the hopes of earning a better grade. About 40% of the students who got the generic note chose to revise their papers. But almost 80% of the wise criticism students revised their papers, and in editing their papers, they made more than twice as many corrections as the other students.

  What makes the second note so powerful is that it rewires the way students process criticism. When they get their paper back, full of corrections and suggestions, their natural reaction might be defensiveness or even mistrust. The teacher has never liked me. But the wise criticism note carries a different message. It says, I know you’re capable of great things if you’ll just put in the work. The marked-up essay is not a personal judgment. It’s a push to stretch.

  4.

  In organizations, mentorship can take a stronger form. High standards + assurance is a powerful formula, but ultimately it’s just a statement of expectations. What great mentors do is add two more elements: direction and support. I have high expectations for you and I know you can meet them. So try this new challenge and if you fail, I’ll help you recover. That’s mentorship in two sentences. It sounds simple, yet it’s powerful enough to transform careers.

  In 2015, Dale Phelps was the director of Quality, Service, and Service Operations for Cummins Northeast, a distributor for Cummins products. Translation: Say you’ve got a contract to build a bunch of city buses for Boston, and you decide to use diesel engines made by Cummins. In that case, Cummins Northeast will process your order, deliver the engines, and provide service if they break down. Phelps’s job was to find ways to make the company’s service better and more efficient.

  In doing his work, Phelps relied heavily on the discipline of Six Sigma. If you manufacture products—let’s say rubber balls—naturally you want them to be free of defects. A “six sigma” process is one that produces only 3.4 defects per million attempts. So if you make a million rubber balls, only 3 or 4 of them will be warped or lopsided. To achieve that level of excellence, you must obsessively monitor the manufacturing process, gathering data to pinpoint problems and to reduce variability. The people who perform these feats of process improvement are practitioners of Six Sigma, and their voodoo can also be practiced on nonmanufacturing situations as well, such as reducing surgical errors or, in the case of Phelps, speeding up engine repair. The most talented practitioners seek out certification as a Six Sigma Black Belt, an honorific that has nothing to do with karate but rather reflects a noble and ultimately hopeless attempt to give the work some sex appeal.

  Back to the story: Phelps needed a Six Sigma Black Belt to assist him with his work in Albany, New York, and he hired Ranjani Sreenivasan for the role. Raised in India, Sreenivasan had been in the United States for only three years, having come to complete her master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

  Sreenivasan’s role was to use Six Sigma to help colleagues improve their processes, for instance by reorganizing the service shops so that more frequently used tools were closer at hand. But she struggled in the role. “She was kind of shy, a little withdrawn,” said Phelps. He worried that she wasn’t assertive enough to be taken seriously by the experienced hands at the firm.

  Sreenivasan had a different perspective. She wasn’t introverted—her friends had nicknamed her “Thunder,” because they always knew when she was in the room. Rather, she was overwhelmed. She knew a lot about Six Sigma but almost nothing about servicing diesel engines. In meetings she felt as if her colleagues were “speaking in Greek and Latin.” She’d take notes of all the terms they used and ask someone later what they meant.

  At her first team meeting for a Six Sigma project, she sat silently, and afterward approached Phelps, distraught. “I was so upset,” she said. “I was seen as this new hire who knew nothing.”

  There was grumbling about her performance. Phelps knew she was the right person for the job, but she was in jeopardy. So he gave her a push. Phelps challenged her to get out in the field and spend some time learning the business. Until she could speak the insiders’ language, it would be difficult for her to command respect.

  “I was a little apprehensive,” Sreenivasan said. Visiting the field meant leaving the safety of her own expertise, which was data and spreadsheets. She worried about exposing her lack of knowledge to her colleagues. Plus, she was young (24), female, and Indian, all three of which were uncommon in the company.

  Her first field visit was to the branch in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. The manager of the branch, one of the few women at that level of leadership, showed her around and tutored her on the business. Sreenivasan stayed for a week and came back to Albany energized.

  “That visit was a game changer,” she said. “All the operational terms started to become clear. Charlene [the Rocky Hill leader] told me how proud she was that I was doing so much at such a young age.”

  Phelps lined up additional field visits, and Sreenivasan became more and more comfortable sharing her Six Sigma insights. Phelps started to hear back from his colleagues how impressed they were. Some of the people who had grumbled about her performance were now citing her as one of their top performers.

  “I learned that I’m capable of more than I thought,” she said. “I didn’t know I could be an operations kind of person. I thought I was a data person. . . . I didn’t have the confidence in myself that Dale had in me.”

  Phelps blames himself for her early difficulties. “I tried to insulate her from a lot of stuff, which in hindsight wasn’t effective and really wasn’t fair to her. If you’re always in a life vest, you don’t know if you can swim. Sometimes you have to take the life vest off—with someone still standing by to offer support and rescue—and say, ‘Let’s see what happens.’ ”

  This story captures the “formula” for mentorship that we’ve been exploring:

  High standards + assurance

  (“I specifically told her that I had high expectations for what I thought she could accomplish,” Phelps said.)

  + Direction + support

  (Phelps suggested the field visits to correct the perceived “hole” in her experience and ensured that her first visit was with a female leader.)

  = Enhanced self-insight.

  (Sreenivasan: “I learned that I’m capable of more than I thought. . . . I didn’t know I could be an operations kind of person.”)

  5.

  A mentor’s push leads to a stretch, which creates a moment of self-insight. What can be counterintuitive about this vision of mentorship is the part about pushing. It requires the mentor to expose the mentee to risk. That can be unnatural; our instinct with the people we care about is to protect them from risk. To insulate them.

  This is also a classic tension of parenting, of course: Should you give your kids the freedom to make mistakes, or should you shield them? Most parents tiptoe nervously along the line between under- and overprotectiveness.

  How do you encourage your kids to stretch—but not too far? Consider the story of Sara Blakely, a woman who was raised to stretch. Blakely is the founder of Spanx, whose first product—basically a comfortable girdle—was an instant hit.II The founding story has become a legend: In 1998, Blakely was getting dressed for a party and she decided to wear her new pair of fitted white pants. But she faced a dilemma. She wanted to wear pantyhose underneath for their slimming effect, but she also wanted bare feet so she could wear sandals. Should she wear hose or not?

  Inspiration struck: She cut the feet off her hose and wore them to the party. Her innovation had its problems—the severed ends of the hose kept rolling up her legs—but she thought to herself, This is my chance. I’ll create a better version of this product, and women will love it.

  Two years later, in 2000, she signed up her first client for Spanx, Neiman Marcus, and Oprah chose Spanx as one of her “Favorite Things.” Twelve years later, Forbes named Blakely the youngest self-made female billionaire in history.

  In Getting There: A Book of
Mentors, Blakely wrote, “I can’t tell you how many women come up to me and say something like ‘I’ve been cutting the feet out of my pantyhose for years. Why didn’t I end up being the Spanx girl?’ The reason is that a good idea is just a starting point.”

  What separated Blakely from other women with the same idea was her persistence. In the early days of Spanx she heard constantly that her idea was stupid or silly. In one meeting with a law firm, she noticed that one of the lawyers kept looking around the room, suspiciously. Later, the lawyer confessed to her, “Sara, I thought when I first met you that your idea was so bad that I thought you had been sent by Candid Camera.”

  Men were largely incapable of understanding the genius of her idea, and unfortunately men held most of the positions she needed to influence to get the product made. (She tried, in vain, to find one female patent lawyer in the state of Georgia.) The owners of textile mills—men, all—rejected her idea again and again. She was only able to create a prototype of the product when one mill owner shared the idea with his daughters—who insisted that he call her back.

  What equipped her to survive this gauntlet of failure? Blakely’s previous job had been selling fax machines. When she started that job, she didn’t receive a lead sheet of people interested in owning a fax machine. Instead her supervisor gave her a territory of four zip codes and handed her a phone book for “leads.”

  “I would wake up in the morning and drive around cold-calling from eight until five,” she wrote. “Most doors were slammed in my face. I saw my business card ripped up at least once a week, and I even had a few police escorts out of buildings. It wasn’t long before I grew immune to the word ‘no’ and even found my situation amusing.”

  That’s a powerful moment of insight. She realizes: I don’t fear failure anymore. It’s no longer an obstacle to me.

  Blakely had been selling fax machines for seven years when she attended the party in her white pants and had her Spanx epiphany. Her relentlessness in building Spanx came from enduring seven years’ worth of—mostly—failure. (To be clear, she was very successful as fax salespeople go.)

  What’s the source of Blakely’s extraordinary grit? It was incubated, no doubt, by her time in sales. But there was something else in her background as well. When Blakely and her brother were growing up, her father would ask them a question every week at the dinner table: “What did you guys fail at this week?”

  “If we had nothing to tell him, he’d be disappointed,” Blakely said. “The logic seems counterintuitive, but it worked beautifully. He knew that many people become paralyzed by the fear of failure. They’re constantly afraid of what others will think if they don’t do a great job and, as a result, take no risks. My father wanted us to try everything and feel free to push the envelope. His attitude taught me to define failure as not trying something I want to do instead of not achieving the right outcome.”

  His question, “What did you guys fail at this week?” was a push to stretch. It was an attempt to normalize failure, to make it part of a casual dinner conversation. Because when you seek out situations where you might fail, failure loses some of its menace. You’ve been inoculated against it.

  Mr. Blakely’s daughter Sara internalized the meaning of that dinner-table question more than he ever could have imagined.

  That’s the story ending that we crave: A likable entrepreneur, inspired by her father, lives her dream and is richly rewarded by the world. Some entrepreneurs win, some entrepreneurs lose. What they share is a willingness to put themselves in a situation where they can fail. It’s always safer to stay put—you can’t stumble when you stand still.

  This is familiar advice for anyone who has ever browsed a self-help aisle of books. Get out there! Try something different! Turn over a new leaf! Take a risk! In general, this seems like sound advice, especially for people who feel stuck. But one note of caution: The advice often seems to carry a whispered promise of success. Take a risk and you’ll succeed! Take a risk and you’ll like the New You better!

  That’s not quite right. A risk is a risk. Lea Chadwell took a risk on a bakery; it made her miserable. If risks always paid off, they wouldn’t be risks.

  The promise of stretching is not success, it’s learning. It’s self-insight. It’s the promise of gleaning the answers to some of the most important and vexing questions of our lives: What do we want? What can we do? Who can we be? What can we endure?

  A psychiatric intern learns that he has the strength to endure trauma. A “small-town girl” learns she can thrive in a foreign country. And even those who fail benefit from learning: Chadwell learned more about what she truly values in life.

  By stretching, we create moments of self-insight, that wellspring of mental health and well-being.

  We will never know our reach unless we stretch.

  * * *

  I. Vocation Vacations has since become Pivot Planet, with a focus on calls rather than in-person visits.

  II. Just wanted you to know that we resisted the urge to include a cheap joke about Spanx in the “Stretch” chapter.

  MOMENTS OF INSIGHT

  THE WHIRLWIND REVIEW

  * * *

  1. Moments of insight deliver realizations and transformations.

  2. They need not be serendipitous. To deliver moments of insight for others, we can lead them to “trip over the truth,” which means sparking a realization that packs an emotional wallop.

  • Kamal Kar’s CLTS causes communities to trip over the truth of open defecation’s harms.

  3. Tripping over the truth involves (1) a clear insight (2) compressed in time and (3) discovered by the audience itself.

  • In the “Dream Exercise,” professors discover they’re spending no time in class on their most important goals.

  4. To produce moments of self-insight, we need to stretch: placing ourselves in new situations that expose us to the risk of failure.

  • Lea Chadwell took a risk by opening a bakery. Overwhelmed, she closed it, and in the process learned more about her capabilities and her values.

  5. Mentors can help us stretch further than we thought we could, and in the process they can spark defining moments.

  • The psychiatry resident Michael Dinneen had a mentor who pushed him to continue working through the night: “He knew I had it in me to make it through that night when I didn’t know that myself.”

  6. The formula for mentorship that leads to self-insight: High standards + assurance + direction + support.

  • Six Sigma expert Ranjani Sreenivasan was pushed by her mentor to develop skills in company operations. “I learned that I’m capable of more than I thought,” she said.

  7. Expecting our mentees to stretch requires us to overcome our natural instinct to protect the people we care about from risk. To insulate them.

  • Spanx founder Sara Blakely’s dad: “What did you guys fail at this week?” He wanted to make it easier (less scary) for his kids to stretch.

  8. The promise of stretching is not success, it’s learning.

  Clinic 3

  Improving a Chinese Restaurant

  The situation: Angela Yang is the owner of Panda Garden House, a fairly conventional American Chinese-food restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina—the kind of place that features General Tso’s chicken, wonton soup, and paper Chinese zodiac placemats. In the era of restaurant review apps like Yelp, Angela sees an opportunity for the restaurant to make a name for itself. She’s ready to make some big changes. (Both Angela and the restaurant are fictitious.)

  The desire: Yang is proud of the food that the restaurant serves but agrees with many of its reviewers that the customer experience is underwhelming. How can she make eating at Panda Garden House dramatically more interesting and memorable?

  How Do We Create a Defining Moment?

  What’s the moment? Panda Garden House is never going to offer a Michelin-star gourmet experience. But remember the lesson of the Magic Castle and its Popsicle Hotline: Great experiences are mostly
forgettable and occasionally remarkable. Angela need not reinvent every part of the experience—she just needs to invest in a few moments of magic.

  Add ELEVATION:

  1: Boost sensory appeal and break the script. Fancy restaurants will often serve every guest an amuse-bouche, a bite-size appetizer provided for free. What if Panda Garden House offered its customer its own signature starter for free? (A miniature pork dumpling?) Or what if patrons, like first-class airline passengers, were presented before their meals with steaming hot towels, scented with jasmine?

  Add INSIGHT:

  1: Stretch for insight. The restaurant could feature a dish that allowed you to test your own “spice endurance”—say, a plate that featured the same dish with five escalating levels of heat. You could test your mettle against the spice tolerance of the Chinese. (Note that this could also double as a moment of pride involving “leveling up.” See Chapter 8.)

  Add PRIDE:

  1: Multiply milestones. Eleven Madison Park in New York City, one of the world’s most acclaimed restaurants, once challenged diners to take a quiz in which they tasted a variety of chocolates and tried to identify which animal’s milk they were made from (cow, goat, sheep, or buffalo). What if Panda Garden House adapted the idea, offering a small sampler of foods from four different regions of China—or using four different common spices—and challenged diners to do the matching? Anyone who nailed all four matches would be awarded a coveted “Big Panda” sticker.

  Add CONNECTION:

  1: At a table where patrons are drinking alcohol, a waiter could offer to share a few rules of Chinese drinking etiquette. For instance, if you clink glasses with another person, you must drink what’s left in your glass. And if you’re clinking with an elder or boss, it’s respectful to make sure that when you clink, the rim of your glass is below the rim of theirs.