Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. I know many people have read this. Many people haven't. I'd love for you to just talk about what this means and why this is important, why this is something that you wanted to share. Yeah, it's one of the things that, especially if you aspire to be a leader and leadership isn't management and leadership isn't being the only person responsible. It's not always the same as accountability. But if you want to have an impact on the world around you, It is exclusively done through the creation of artifacts or verbalizations that affect other humans. That's all there is. That's all there is if you want to have an impact, if you want to create some kind of a lasting change. And it could be in your little relationship. It could be in your team. It could be in your company. It could be in the world. uh it is down to communication and so often you hear people saying like oh like yeah that was like i had that i wrote that up a year ago it's like yeah but you did a bad job of writing a year ago or we would have not wasted a year not doing it like it's like you know it's like the you know people always think it's oh i had that idea and that's like means anything it means nothing it means absolutely nothing or it's like oh like i wrote this post like well you didn't break through with it. So that's on you. It's not on the audience. People want to blame the audience. Well, the audience is just there. And so I mentioned this even earlier, and I hope people caught it, when I said, hey, if I give somebody a piece of work and they come back six months later and they have done the wrong thing, I'll take the L. I will take the L on that. It's not great for them. They'll be pissed they wasted their time. But like I said, that's my responsibility. I did not communicate clearly what I wanted, what the expectations were. Could they have also helped themselves? Sure, they could have. And that's a thing that takes all sides. We should work on this problem from both angles. I have another post called listening is the job, which is the other side of this. But like communication is job is I really believe it actually is a relationship to this idea that came out of the US Marines and SEALs of extreme ownership. Which is like, so whenever something goes wrong, I ask myself, what could I have done differently in terms of how I communicated things for this to have gone better? Could I have set priorities better? Could I have set expectations better? Did I need to have a better metric that I pointed the team at? Did I put the wrong people on it? By the way, the thing I talk about is org charts are communication devices. They don't exist. There's not a physical string between you and your manager. They're just communication tools that are supposed to give people a rough sense of how things are organized and where to go with who. And so all of these things are communication. Silence is communication. Me not reaching out to you to check on you, to check on your project, right? We talked about the eye of sorrow earlier. What does that mean? That means trust. That means responsibility, like the absence of check-ins has meaning. You cannot not communicate.…

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