Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, he'd be great. Okay, so we've been chatting about ways individually to get better at some of these skills. Another area that I think people struggle with is the company culture often isn't welcoming of direct feedback. So there's a question, so you probably saw this on Twitter. I asked people, what should I ask you? And a lot of people came in with a lot of questions and there's one that came in from Pete, so I'm just going to read it along these lines. So this question is just how do you practice being radically candid in a culture? And most cultures are like this where people aren't ready for direct feedback. Since company culture is often closer to ruinous empathy and being radically candid is more of a long-term good than a short-term good. You could potentially risk retention with your employees if you're too direct with them. So how do you think about finding this balance of being candid but not pissing people off, or do you just hire people that are open and ready for direct feedback and that's kind of how you solve that problem? I don't think you can only hire people who are open and ready for direct feedback because it's hard for all of us. I just want to acknowledge that, it's hard for me. I mean, I wrote the book, I believe in it to my core and sometimes it's still hard for me. It's hard for me to hear it and it's hard for me to deliver it. This is a really difficult thing to do. The good thing about that two by two is it makes it look easy, which is useful, but it's not easy. So anyway, I think there are, to answer Pete's question, I think there are a few things that can help. There's really an order of operations to radical candor, and if you begin with soliciting criticism, then you take the first and most important step to improving your relationship with that person enough that it becomes easier for you to give it as well as to get it. So I want to leave folks with some sort of steps on how to solicit feedback, and this is true, especially if you're a boss, but it's true in all your relationships. You can use this at home as well. So if you say, "Do you have any feedback for me?" You're wasting your breath. The other person's going to say, "Oh no, everything's fine." Nobody in your life accepts your teenage children. If you have teenage children, they'd really want to give you some criticism, but nobody else in your life really wants to give you criticism. And so you want to think about how you're going to ask the person that's going to be most likely to elicit a response. The question that I like to ask is, "What could I do or stop doing that would make it easier to work with me?" But do not write down my question because if you sound like Kim Scott and not like yourself, then other people are not going to believe you want the answer. It needs to sound authentic to you. I was working with Christa Quarles when she was CEO of OpenTable and she said, "Kim, I could never imagine those words coming out of my mouth." She said, "The way I like to ask is tell me why I'm wrong." Okay, that's fine too. It demands an answer to her question. But of course there were a couple of people on her team who felt that that was too aggressive, that shut them down, so she had to adjust her question. Being authentic does not mean ignoring the impact you're having on others. So you want to think about your question, you want to think about who you're going to ask that question of, and if everybody can write down their question, who they're going to ask it of and then pop it into their calendar right now, this will be one of the most productive podcasts in all of podcast land.…

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