Everyone Can Set You Up for Failure, Not Everyone Sets You Up for Success

Published on November 2, 2024, filed under Philosophy and Management (RSS feed for all categories).

Here’s something that has been on my mind since observing our not thinking about this enough at one of my last stations. It’s this:

Everyone can set you up for failure. ^*

I have AI-written an entire booklet about how there are problems with everything, and I wrote this book because it’s such a fundamental lesson that’s as easily missed: There’s nothing to finding problems with you, with me, with them, with anyone and anything.

With finding problems being so easy, it’s also easy to set others up for failure: Focus on and point at, without reflection, the problems with or around them.

Interestingly, the opposite is also true:

Everyone can set you up for success. ^*

That is, it’s just as easy to find good things about everyone and everything, which helps drive people’s success.

However, on a general level, this focus on good things quickly gets so awkward that many people will reject the idea, so that practically speaking, few people make that choice. They may not intentionally not make it, but still, they don’t make it.

While the two statements could balance each other out, that awkwardness of seeing good in everyone and everything leads to an imbalance, and that’s why the title of this post says “not everyone sets you up for success.” They can—they just don’t do it.

A Conscious Choice

Yet, what does this mean?

First, and it bears repeating, there’s no intellectual gold star in finding flaws in anything. Although we may pride ourselves with it, there’s nothing to see here. I tried to hammer this point home in The Problems With All the Good Things, but an earlier example can be found in Why It Would Be Bad if Jesus Was Here. (Certainly, this insight is much older—I just know my stuff best.)

Second, setting people up for failure or for success is a choice—if people make it. Many people probably don’t think about it, and therefore end up setting up peers for random rides, rides that don’t lead these peers to sustained success.

Therefore, third, what we’re looking to be and whom we’re looking to work with is people who deliberately set others up for success.

❧ And that’s what I’ve been ruminating on at times—how few people there seem to be who make a decision to set others up for success, and how that quite trivially boils down to conscious choice. (One that I, personally, love the most about being a manager.) So there we are—happy weekend.

A quick closing note, none of this here is to imply things just “happened” to us. That makes this all a lot more complicated, but it’s important to state.

The night before posting I noticed I didn’t write anything about how you could test whether someone is setting you up for success. It’s not hard: Ask, what does the person do to set you up for success? If nothing comes to mind—the eye-opener I experienced with key people I was working with—, you are, at that moment, effectively set up for failure. This is a question you need a clear answer to. (To test yourself, you want to be as quick to answer this for the people you’re working with. Otherwise you’re not setting them up for success, either.)

^* This doesn’t mean you do fail or succeed. It means that you have a higher probability to fail or succeed.

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m a contributor to several web standards, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (Please be critical, interpret charitably, and give feedback.)