Evan LaPointe: preference

Transcript context

…Where I want to take this is when we work with other people, working with other people is very hard, and some of the struggles people have at work in building product, in running a company and building teams, hiring, all these things, is they often get really frustrated by the way other people operate. Some people want to just start building a thing, some people want to really think about it. Some people are very customer qualitative, anecdote focused, some people are very metrics focused. Some people are very collaborative, want to work in groups, some people are very, I want to work alone. Just first of all, we just talked about here's how the brain works and then there's this idea of people work very differently. Can you just talk a bit about just this idea of why people behave so differently in an effort to help us learn to work better with people that are just like, "Oh, that's so strange. This person wants to just their billing. Maybe one of the worst pieces of propaganda that people walk around with in their minds is the phrase we're more similar than we are different. My theory on why we walk around with that phrase or why we're told that phrase, if we zoom in on the situations where we hear that is that we have this theory, it's easier to get along with people that are like us. If we fantasize that this person is like me, then I might get along with them better. When in fact, we should probably be building the muscle that we have the capacity to get along with people that are extremely different than we are. That fourth piece that we talk about in our coursework when we train managers, for example, is personality. We talk about your brain systems, your brain focus, your brain's ability, which sort of paints the picture that humans might be similar to each other and we can activate these things kind of unilaterally. Then we have to drop this bomb at the end, which is, and here's why that doesn't work consistently across different types of people. I know you took our profile, our big five-based profile, and that's just one tool out of many that can help a person understand where on these various spectrum of personality traits and motivations they sit. We often use the metaphor in our training of culinary school that we're more culinary school for human performance instead of cooking class. That helps people conceptualize that I'm used to going to cooking classes in my training, here's how to do a one-on-one, here's how to offer feedback, here's a framework for generating product ideas through to prioritization and backlog. We're like, "Well, what's going on beneath the surface? What are the underlying principles and forces at work that all the stuff that comes to life on the surface really originates from?" In this culinary school metaphor, one of the things that's really important for a chef is to actually understand what are my preferences? What do I like to eat? Because if I don't know what I like, then I assume everybody else likes what I like, then I'm not going to be a very dynamic chef. I'm going to be like, "Everybody likes lots of salt and acidity in their dishes." Then you're going to go to Germany and open a restaurant and be like, "That is absolutely not what we're looking for in this cuisine." Self-awareness is a really important step, not just of culinary school, but for everybody. You sit somewhere on a spectrum, your brain has these pathways and these traffic cops directing traffic in your mind. You have to start with square one with yourself and understand, am I prone to try to say things politely, and so that they're received well? Or am I prone to be super blunt and direct and maybe even mean and harsh? Am I prone to sit back in conversations and let things happen, or am I prone to take over? Am I prone to go to intellectual abstract thinking and try to deconstruct ideas or am I prone to stay very pragmatic? ne to sit back in conversations and let things happen, or am I prone to take over? Am I prone to go to intellectual abstract thinking and try to deconstruct ideas or am I prone to stay very pragmatic? If you don't know who you are and you think that the universe resembles you, then you're going to get super lost in that broader spectrum. I think the big five, I mean there's a bunch of models. You have Myers-Briggs, disk, etc. They're just all imperfect ways of measuring personality, but also, useful despite the fact that they're imperfect and especially useful if you take a growth mentality instead of a justification mentality to reading them. If you say, "okay, I'm low in politeness, I'm super direct." Your justification mentality of that would be like, "Yeah, damn right. I'm awesome that everybody knows what I really mean and how I really feel.' Versus the growth thing, which is like, well, maybe there are situations where I can try a little harder than 0% to phrase things in a way that if we work backwards from the outcome, we want to choose our actions right now, would these actions so direct actually increase or reduce the probability of that outcome? That's when we become more dynamic chefs, more dynamic people. Personality is a broad spectrum and self-awareness is the starting point for the whole thing. The big five model gives you a really good list of attributes to scan yourself through, and then you should be making a game plan for how to do that. Then you can turn your attention to the network of humans you're a part of and say, "Okay, well in what ways, because I'm me, am I so different than these other minds?" How can we create a mesh mentality where thought shifts among the group to fit most naturally? In product work, especially, whether you're a founder, entrepreneur, thinking about product at that level and your team at that level, or you're in the thick of product work pushing your mind and other people's minds to get this right, then you're going to benefit a lot from understanding these traits and these differences.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.