In my 20s I had two jobs that shaped the rest of my career. My supervisors had very different attitudes about making mistakes. The first was quick to point out my mistakes, gleefully seeking out every detail. The second expected me to make mistakes, encouraging me to try new things and learn from the experience. Here’s what I learned from both of them.
Paying for university
When I was in my teens and early 20s, my family lived in California’s Salinas Valley. My father worked for a company that dehydrated onions and garlic for products such as pickles and garlic salt. As is typical in agriculture, the work was highly seasonal. During the season, the plant operated 24/7, while in the off season there was little to do. But to maintain the quality of the workforce, management paid their key personnel year round.
During the peak season, the schedule was grueling, entailing 12-hour shifts. The plant manager didn’t want the expense of adding more full-time staff. But he needed to do something to make the jobs less stressful. So he decided to hire university students to work seasonally. There were no benefits—just a generous salary for the five or six months when there was work. He chose young students so they’d come back for several seasons, gaining experience and judgment. I was among the first, beginning just after my sophomore year.
Because UC Berkeley was on the quarter system, I wasn’t available for work until a few weeks after the season started. That gave my colleagues a fresh reminder each year of just what I was saving them from—a strong incentive to help me succeed. I worked the relief shifts. That is, each week I worked day-, swing-, and graveyard shifts. It was like perpetual jet lag—the sort of schedule you can tolerate only at that age.
Micromanaging to avoid mistakes
When I started the job, there was some attempt to train me. There was even a manual that covered the basics. Food-processing facilities have a lot of regulations pertaining to food safety, along with those covering worker safety and other policies.
The union contract had expired that spring. But the union had put itself in a better bargaining position by not renewing it until the season really got going. Why threaten a strike when there’s not much work anyway? It made for tense labor relations—not the ideal conditions for a novice supervisor.
To make matters worse, my supervisor was a micromanager. Everything had to be just so. But in any job, there are things no one can anticipate. One of my colleagues had kindly set up my schedule to limit my interactions with our supervisor. This was a department in which no one wanted the normally preferred day shift, as it meant full days with him. So I’d work days on weekends only, my schedule overlapping his for an hour or so at the beginning of a swing shift or the end of a graveyard shift. That was enough.
Naturally situations would crop up that I didn’t know how to deal with. I’d consult the manual, but it didn’t cover everything. Rather than call my supervisor at 3 in the morning, I’d make my best guess. Sometimes it was good enough, but not always, especially at first. Then I’d hear from my supervisor just what I’d done wrong.
Learning by doing means making mistakes
The job was in the shipping department, which operated from two large warehouses. Empty drums came in each hour of the graveyard shift for the workers to offload. During the day- and swing shifts, workers would fill orders by selecting drums or boxes of product, loading them onto pallets, shrink wrapping them, and loading them onto the outbound trucks.
Naturally there was a lot of forklift traffic, and safe driving was essential. Most drivers were careful, but some liked to drive a little too fast. In a space that size, it wasn’t possible to watch everyone all the time. However, that didn’t stop my supervisor from sweating the details. I began my workweek with a graveyard shift, so my first interaction with him was early the following morning. He pointed out that one of my drivers had left skid marks on the pavement and wanted to know whether I’d noticed them. In fact, I hadn’t been able to see the black skid marks on the unlit asphalt pavement. Nor was I able to tell whether they’d been left on my shift or during one of my days off. No matter; I must be responsible for them.
After weeks of his seemingly constant pointing out my failings, I’d had enough. I told him I didn’t make mistakes on purpose, but simply did what seemed best when there was no guidance. Even he had to concede that I never made the same mistake twice, and eventually his criticisms abated. I came back for two more seasons, earning enough to complete my bachelor’s degree without debt.
I learned a lot in that job about managing people—not only subordinates, but also colleagues and supervisors. Most important, I learned to think like a manager, not just an employee.
Applying what I learned
I received my master’s degree in 1982, during a recession. One of my professors helped me find work in the Seattle area. At that time the price of oil was high, so it was worth the cost of drilling in remote areas such as the North Slope of Alaska. I went to work at a structural engineering firm, helping to design a mobile concrete structure for oil exploration. It was to be built in a drydock and towed to the site, where it would be ballasted and held in place by piles. Each year the piles would be removed, the ballast water pumped out, and the structure towed to a new site. The company had made its reputation on such innovative design, and it was exciting to work with and learn from my colleagues.
It soon became clear that for the walls to resist the forces of the near-shore ice and yet be light enough for the structure to float, we needed a kind of concrete that did not yet exist. So the firm hired a concrete materials expert to develop a concrete with the necessary strength-to-weight ratio and durability. As a student I’d developed a strong interest in materials, so when he needed a junior engineer for the research and development effort, I volunteered.
The project entailed a consortium of oil companies and Japanese construction firms, along with two materials laboratories in the Midwest. My boss made sure I participated in all the meetings, visiting the laboratories and eventually administering the contracts. He gave me assignments that were beyond my capabilities and then supported me until I could do them on my own. Later, when he was on assignment in Japan for weeks at a time, he trusted me to take care of things in Seattle.
Making good use of mistakes
In teaching technical writing at the University of St. Thomas, we use a system called Writing Across the Curriculum. That is, we teach writing as an integral part of other courses. Students gain experience in three types of writing:
- Learning to write: the mechanics of writing.
- Writing to learn: writing to help process what the students are learning. For example, a study abroad might require them to journal about their experiences and observations.
- Writing in the discipline: writing the kinds of reports students will produce during their careers.
I teach engineering students to write reports for their clients in the capstone Senior Design Clinic. Eventually the students produce a report of about 50 pages detailing the results of their two-semester design project. But they don’t start there.
Instead, I start with a series of short, low-stakes assignments. That way the students can focus on a few things at a time. Each subsequent assignment builds on the previous one. For the three drafts, I tell them to just write something, going for quantity rather than quality. However bad it is to begin with, we can make it better, and we do. I give them detailed feedback on each assignment. It’s their responsibility to incorporate it into the subsequent drafts. At this stage there’s no penalty for making mistakes; the only penalty is for not trying. They just need to correct any mistakes quickly so they don’t develop bad habits. Practice doesn’t make perfect; it makes permanent.
In this way the students can put their mistakes to good use by learning from them. Indeed, if you’re not making mistakes, you’ve stopped growing.