Keith Yandell: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, that makes sense. Touching a little bit on it, you talked about all these amazing people you've led and how you've been able to do that. Something else I've heard that you do that's pretty unusual is you help people that you manage find their next job, which may not necessarily be within the company, maybe at another company. You kind of help them land it and find something else to do. I've never heard of that before, really. I'd love to hear why you decided to do that, how you do that, and just the kind of impact, second-order impact, maybe, that has, maybe that leads you to be doing this. It wasn't a calculated decision why I started doing it. Then I gave it a lot of thought because I was afraid that I might get some blowback when people started taking jobs elsewhere. And as I thought about it, I realized it really is better for the company to have that type of open dialogue with people that work on your team. I think that's true for a few reasons. In this "How to work with Keith" document, I say, "I will help you find your next job." And what that means is, number one, people are going to be transparent with you, or more transparent, if they're looking for something else or if they're not happy. That's going to allow you to lay the foundation for a backfill so you're much less likely to get surprised when someone leaves. Number two, what's going to happen is if someone runs a blind reference on me at this point with someone that I've managed, which in the current environment is more and more common, people diligencing the managers, what they're going to hear is, "Keith's going to put you first." And I think that's really motivating for a lot of people. So if you're thinking on a five-, 10-year horizon of your career as a manager, whether you're an entrepreneur hiring people into your company, whether you're a product manager who's trying to build a team, building that long-term reputation, I think people take much too shortsighted perspective on that. And so now if I get a blind reference, people are going to hear that, "It's not all about the company. It's not all about Keith. It's about you and your career," and that's going to pay back 10x. Maybe you lose one really talented person, but they probably shouldn't be there anyway. They're probably going to leave anyway. And this way, you can participate in that and really drive value for them, as well as for the company in the future, by creating a much better reputation for the group of managers. So it's been really helpful for me. I keep in touch with a lot of people who have left, and we get a lot of boomerangs, too. There's a lot of people who leave DoorDash and come back. And that's something I love seeing because it shows that people have gone out and seen what else is out there and realized this is the right place for them. Can you talk a bit about how you operationalize this? Because this is just out there. "Tell me if you're thinking about a new job, and I will talk to you through your options and help you find something." Or is there anything else there for folks that maybe want to offer this to their employees?…

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