Molly Graham: preference

Transcript context

…Awesome. Keep going. I'll give you two more that are helpful. This one is a Mark Zuckerberg classic, but he has this very strong feeling that people don't escalate enough. And he was very adamant about it at Facebook. And he brought it to CZI too where he was like, "Escalation is a tool." And he's like, "People get stuck. They get stuck with two people with equal power trying to solve a problem. You can spend so much time bashing heads, going back and forth. And actually what you just need to do is go up. You need to go." The problem is that we think of escalation as, "I'm A and B and I are disagreeing. And so, I'm going to go up to C and tell on B. I'm going to go tattle to the teacher." That is not what escalation is. What escalation is, "We disagree. Neither one of us has enough power to make this decision. Let's go to someone who does." My boss, my boss's boss, whoever it is. As soon as you are stuck, escalate. Go together, go make your case to whoever it is, go together up. That is unlocking. It's saving you a whole bunch of time. And it's something that I've found as I've worked with companies and leaders in Glue Club. It's not a muscle that's very comfortable for people, but it's so smart. And Mark has a lot of these, but that one I really took away because again, I think so many people think of escalation as bad, a failure, like, "I failed, so I had to escalate. " No, it's a tool. It's what management is for. They're there to unblock you. Let them unblock you. Stop arguing over something you can't decide. And they'll be so happy knowing you did not waste a week debating this and then just arguing and just looking at data. It's like, "Okay, I can just tell you exactly what we should do. Let's go do that."…

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