Education
The benefits of failing
How to create trust to allow people to fail--and learn
By Patrick Mayock
Smart Business Pittsburgh | March 2008
George L. Pry
President, The Art Institute of Pittsburgh
When making a first
impression, it’s crucial to lead with your best foot forward,
says George L. Pry, president of
The Art Institute of Pittsburgh.
He learned that lesson the
hard way more than two
decades ago at the system’s
Seattle location. The Art
Institute had just acquired the
city’s Burnley School for
Professional Art, and Pry was
charged with leading the transition. However, instead of establishing a favorable reputation by touting student work and
accomplishments, the president
championed a full-out marketing blitz that lacked substance
and subsequently hurt initial
enrollment.
He didn’t make the same mistake in Pittsburgh. Pry has nearly doubled the student body in
two years at the 1,300-employee
Pittsburgh location by showcasing his students’ passion
through public art openings,
workshops and an award-winning Web site for the institute, whose 2007-2008 budget
is $182 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Pry about failure, creativity and
how to make a great first
impression on the Web.
Don’t be afraid to let people fail.
Make them learn from their
mistakes so that they can
learn to succeed.
In order for people to be
able to fail, they have to first
be able to trust you.
If there’s not trust, then people are going to say, ‘Hey, if I
fail, I’m going to be canned
tomorrow.’
I don’t care what vision or
what plan you have. Unless
you’re perfect, there are going
to be pitfalls on the way.
You’re not going to have all
the answers. In order for
somebody to get answers,
some of them are going to
have to fail to find what those
right answers are.
It’s a matter of building trust
and being patient with people. People see that quickly,
[they see] whether you’re
patient or not.
I don’t think any good leader
doesn’t have a fair amount of
impatience about getting
results. At the end of the day,
the only way you can get
results is you have to have
enough patience to let people
do their thing.
The benefit is, you get way
more out of people that have
trust and understand your
vision than you can get out of
quickly rushing to judgment.
What that does is shut down
creativity, and it shuts down
the ability to succeed.
The real benefit of allowing
people to fail is saying, ‘There
are all kinds of different ways
to make this happen. Take the
risk, and take the commitment to make it happen.’
Teach creativity. There are many
people who have the misperception that either you have
creativity or you don’t. Just
like any talent, creativity can be learned.
It’s the ability to get solutions from a variety of different inputs. You have to teach
it. We bring people in, and we
start from the basics, and then
we teach them to look for different types of solutions.
Sometimes, you need a
model. Sometimes, you need
to be put in with people who
do [think creatively]. People
learn from each other.
There are many times I’ve
taken a particular employee
who’s either obstinate or sort
of has a mind block on various ways to accomplish something. Team them up, get them
responsible for the solution so
that the team doesn’t fail, and
you make sure that there are a
(few people) on the team who
may think a little bit too much
out of the box.
Develop your Web presence. If
you’re going to be successful,
you better have a solid Web
presence.
You can reach thousands
and thousands of people, and
you can either leave a good
impression or not leave a
good impression.
It’s just like when you meet
someone in person — that
first impression really sticks.
You’d better lead with your
best foot forward.
The first thing is, you’ve got
to know what you want out of
the Web site. You’ve better
have a plan of what you want
to gain from it. What are you
trying to accomplish with the
Web site?
The second issue would be,
how creative do you want it
to be? How interactive do
you want it to be?
It’s not like the Yellow
Pages, where you open it up
and just try to find where
this college is at. You want
them to sort of get engrossed
in it.
The third, obviously, is setting up a course of action to
accomplish all of the various
details of it.
We look at the Web results
on a month-to-month basis,
so we’re always keenly
aware of what number of
hits we have and which of
those hits lead to action.
That’s really the effort and
the mainstream behind a
good Web page. It’s how you
get people to take the next
step. It’s a matter of sitting down and trying to put that
in a visual presentation that
leads people from step A to
step B and, hopefully, to step
D — ultimately, wherever we
need it to go.
We knew we wanted it to
be interactive, to lead people
to other questions and have
those questions be available
to them either by jumping on
a different link or by working it in right there on the
Web page itself or picking up
the phone and making that
call to say, ‘I saw this, but
what about X, Y and Z?’
It’s sort of just methodically
walking someone through
that process and not getting
them lost in the process.
HOW TO REACH: The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, www.artinstitutes.edu/pittsburgh or (800) 275-2470
