ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT One of the key failure stories Faul shares draws his time at Pinterest. Early on, he worked on major projects related to the company’s culture. “I know there were many pieces of this I approached the wrong way. I made some bad decisions, including one that didn’t get the response we wanted at all inside the company — it just didn’t land,” he says. “It was my ifrst big, visible failure as an executive, and I knew it relfected poorly on me. I had to work through that, acknowledge the failure, apologize for it, discuss it over and over again. It was incredibly hard for me to do.” Instead of sweeping the episode under the rug, he now tells this story again and again. Whenever his team confronts a similar situation or makes a mistake, he recalls it. Because the truth is, he did get through it. His team at Pinterest not only survived but went on to other successes. Knowing that recovery is possible on this level generates productive psychological safety for everyone involved. There’s another story in this genre Faul tells, that almost everyone working at a startup will relate to at some point. Atfer he was at Facebook for a while, Sandberg — his manager at the time — hired someone new to take over a large part of his job. “This was honestly one of the hardest moments in my career — one of those big moments where I felt like a failure, like I wasn’t moving forward,” he says. “When we talked, she told me that it was because the company was scaling and this is a normal function of scale. Now I can see it was 100% the right decision, but at the time it felt awful.” Fault’s told this story 100 times, he says, to make it clear to people on his team that this is something even the best employees will go through at fast-growing companies. It’s important that he admits the depth of the emotion he felt, and even that he questioned what was happening and doubted himself. Because this is what he knows people he manages will experience. “I can tell people, ‘I’ve been through this and I legitimately know that you’re going to make it through this and be ifne, be better, do more,’” he says. “Now I have three or four stories over the course of my career like this that I tell to sotfen these hard moments for the people I work with and give them the conifdence to endure and stay excited.” Being vulnerable doesn’t weaken your authority. It strengthens everyone else around you. 24