As I get older, I grow more tolerant of mistakes. I see them as an opportunity to learn. Now I’m excited to make mistakes because they can iteratively sculpt my approach to solving problems.

I realize that an ideal coworker is someone who is not necessarily decorated with accolades and accreditations, but someone who can learn quickly from their mistakes. Based on my brief experience, it is sometimes easier to train someone from scratch than to have them re-learn how to grow from experiencing a mistake. I’ve witnessed PhD’s get in the way of brilliant individuals from learning from their mistakes. I’ve seen ego and pride get in the way of skilled senior employees/executives from learning from their mistakes. The common theme I’ve come to appreciate is that the fundamental process of acknowledging a mistake, taking responsibility for that mistake, and then learning from that mistake to improve the situation, is a very hard process to sustain when the working environment is not set up to encourage this mistake-making process.

To build a system where this process is fluid with minimal resistance, we have to first understand what gets in the way (or resists) the process:

• titles
• bonuses
• on-boarding (known in some organizations as hazing)
• performance reviews
• office culture

Titles empower individuals while absolving them from responsibility of a team. Titles create animosity and tension amongst team members by prescribing relative hierarchy to people who could work equally hard and side-by-side on projects. Products should drive efforts, not titles. At Google, teams are built behind the identity of the product being worked on, so “I work on the Google Drive team” becomes the response. This sets individual focus outwards on the success of the product instead of inwards on the title and hierarchy of corporate structure.

Bonuses are a great way to ostracize people from their teams. If a single bonus is given, the employee who receives it will be at odds with her/his team, effectively polarizing them from the rest of the team. Those who are motivated by bonuses, are generally those who are acting internally to improve their individual situation as opposed to externally to move the team forward.

On-boarding is an outsider’s introduction to an existing team and lifestyle. The outcome hoped for from on-boarding is a short-term investment of productivity resources in return for a measurable improvement of productivity throughput.  Although the impact of a positive on-boarding experience is that the team’s productivity is multiplied, not linearly added to (teams are dynamically synergistic), the on-boarding process is stereotyped as a painfully drawn-out experience that ends with the employee being accepted by management and rejected by coworkers or vice versa, the later being a terminal condition for the employee (although usually a paradoxically more valuable outcome for productivity). Managers do not get work done, employees do. A manager will recognize that a united people is a powerful force, regardless of the source. A gifted manager will leverage the team’s cohesion (even if caused by united animosity against her/him) to move company initiatives forward.

Performance reviews are exams that shift team focus to individual survival. They instill an anxiety in groups of people that preclude the formation of teams as members focus inwards on their comparative value to other members, redirecting the team’s unified attention outward on product deadlines to an internal struggle of competence. And in fact, former team members will defend publicly known weak members during performance reviews as insurance to protect themselves from bottom-tier ratings.

Culture is the single most effective instrument for cultivating a motivating environment for the mistake-making process. People who work together naturally form a tribe, and to reach a flow state of productivity, they must feel enhanced by their tribe, not dimmed. As the previous points have illustrated, culture is affected by many factors, and is therefore hard to get right. By keeping in mind the pitfalls of the above “best practices” of corporate structure, being open to the unique culture that emerges within teams and learning from mistakes (our own and others’), we can be better equipped to handle the winding twists, turns, and bumps that go hand-in-hand with growing a business.