Lenny Rachitsky: recommendation

Transcript context

…Well, I think just that the reason, one of the many reasons that people have gone uncomfortable giving feedback is that somebody might get defensive or they might start crying as we talked about. And so I have a script also, which is if someone gets defensive, which is it's like I'm giving you this feedback and you're getting defensive and I say, "Well, let's pause for a second. First of all, I want you to know that I'm telling you this actually, just to make you better because I know how important your career is to you. I know how important the success is to you and it's important to me too as your leader. The second thing is, my observation is that you're getting a little bit emotional. I want to know if we can continue having this conversation now or if we need to kind of pause it. At the end of the day, we really have to have this conversation and I really want to see you make changes, but I understand you might need a few moments to digest it." The importance of that for you is not even what you say, but that you have prepared and you are prepared for if someone has that kind of reaction and that you don't have to, yourself, react to it. You know, "No, I'm not doing that. No, no, no, no, whatever." And you can say, "Yes, you are." Now we're in a fight and that is not cool for anybody. It's certainly not cool for you as a leader. So it gives you the opportunity to recognize that you have another tool in your toolkit rather than just react. So if you find yourself feeling defensive or they are just not hearing and just fighting back, the tool is just pause. Let's just pause for a moment and it feels like there's kind of two parts to which you just shared. One is, remind them why this is important to them and why you're talking about this. And then two is, if there's just emotions kind of taking over, give them a chance to like, "Let's just pause and maybe come back to this because maybe you're not in the right state right now to listen. " Yeah, exactly.…

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