Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…hat he had at all times. But I didn't know any of that at the time. All I knew is that Bob was consistently doing bad work, but I wasn't really dealing with it. And eventually the inevitable happened. I realized that if I didn't fire Bob, I was going to lose all my best performers because not only had it been unfair to Bob not to tell him, I also had been unfair to everyone on the team. And they were frustrated. Their deliverables were late because his deliverables were late. They weren't able to do their best work because they were having to spend so much time redoing his work. And the people who were best at their jobs were going to quit because they wanted to be able to do their best work. They were going to go to a different company where they could do their best work. And so I sat down to have a conversation with Bob that I should have begun frankly 10 months previously. And when I finished explaining to him where things stood, he kind of pushed his chair back from the table. He looked me right in the eye and he said, "Why didn't you tell me?" And as that question was going around in my head with no good answer, he looked at me again and he said, "Why didn't anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me." And now I realized that by not telling Bob, thinking I was being so nice, I'm having to fire him as a result. Not so nice after all. But it was too late to say Bob because at this point even he agreed he should go because his reputation on the team was just shot. All I could do in the moment was make myself a very solemn promise that I would never make that mistake again, and that I would do everything in my power to help other people avoid making that mistake. It was so painful. It was painful for me. It was painful for Bob, much more painful for Bob actually, and it was bad for the whole team and it was bad for our investors. We weren't getting results because of my ruinous empathy and ruinous empathy slash manipulative insincerity. It's much harder to admit the manipulative insincerity part. And that is really why I'm here talking to you because I want all of your listeners to avoid making that mistake because it's the most painful and the most common mistake that I think leaders and not just leaders, I mean all of us make this mistake in all of our relationships. I love that this also gives an example of the impact of getting better at this point of you'll lose not just the people that are not necessarily great, but also other high performers on the team because they're seeing people slip through the cracks that aren't amazing. And if you're not practicing this early, your team basically becomes not high performing. Yeah, exactly. You're going to lose your top performers. And I think very often people are afraid to tell someone on their team when their work isn't good enough because they're afraid of losing them. But that's not a good reason. You should be helping this person to improve. This person deserves to have a job where they can excel and you either help them excel on this team or you help them find a different job where they can excel, because everyone can do great work somewhere. And Bob could have done great work. Maybe I would've helped him keep it to the weekends because he's very creative and very smart, but the floppy mistakes just got in the way of his ability to do his best work.…

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