Freedom to Fail: How A Dean’s Lesson Shaped His Leadership

"Part of my job is to help students be resilient in the face of failure. You only gain resilience from such experiences.”

When Gary Bennett, now Dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, was a graduate student training in clinical psychology, he was learning to balance two demanding roles: how to conduct a research program, as most Ph.D. students do, and gain experience in clinical work. 

The clinical side of the training required learning how to sit with people, hold space for them, guide, counsel and deliver treatment, a highly specific set of skills that can only be honed through practice, trial and error, and plenty of mistakes.

But beyond the therapy room, there was another side of the job: the administrative demands, something most people don’t think about. It’s learning to take notes, manage paperwork, handle insurance and billing, communicate with other providers, report to supervisors and write detailed reports. Bennett was focused on becoming a strong therapist in the room, but he struggled to manage everything outside of it. 

That tension bled into his research life. 

“I was trying hard to be a good therapist in the room, but I wasn’t managing everything outside it,” Bennett said. “From the paperwork, my research and my lab work, it all started to conflict. And my supervisors were noticing.” 

And at one point, things were so bad that his supervisor sat him down and gave him feedback. 

“It was really hard,” he said.  “I knew I wasn’t balancing things well, but I hadn’t ever gotten feedback telling me I wasn’t doing a good job before. I was shell-shocked.”

Bennett says that, like himself, he often encounters students at Duke who have always excelled throughout their academic lives and have never really failed. And, of course, that’s often why they’ve ended up at Duke. 

Over time, he’s had to learn that when one of these students receives, say, an A-minus on a test for the first time, it’s not helpful to respond with the usual reassurance like “It’s not the end of the world” or “You’ll be fine.”  He’s found that those kinds of trite comments don’t land the way they’re meant to.

“I try to reach for my own moments of failure because I know how they hurt,” says Bennett, “and I also know that part of my job is to help students be resilient in the face of failure. You only gain resilience from such experiences.”

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If you are a Trinity faculty member interested in participating in Freedom to Fail, please contact Elizabeth Richardson from Trinity Communications.