Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, so in my course I talk about not being a single-minded martyr. So single-minded martyr is someone who very much has an agenda, who wants the recommendation to go through and is presenting a bunch of evidence, supporting that direction. And then gets really frustrated when other people are not seeing it or are skeptical. And so one of my clients was a single-minded martyr in a recommendation she was making. So she was on the growth acquisition side of her company. And was having trouble with cross-functional team members lending headcount to her project. And so everyone would say like, " Oh, yes, we believe in this, this is important," but wouldn't want to actually give her half of their engineer for two weeks. And we were talking about it and as we were talking, she revealed that the CEO had at the beginning of the year said that the company-wide goal is retention that year. That their biggest challenges and areas of opportunity were in retention, not necessarily in growth. And once she zoomed out and realized this, she was able to put her recommendation in context. And realized that it's not just- ... recommendation in context. And realize that it's not just I'm the only one who cares about this company. Everyone is a hypocrite. They say they believe this, but don't actually want to work on it. Before that was kind of her narrative, but once she zoomed out and realized she was being a single [inaudible 00:48:16], she could better fit her proposal in the context of what else was happening in the organization. I think actually this is a really big difference between more junior people versus more senior people. More junior people are like, "I need to win. I need to get a yes for this proposal and I'm going to keep advocating for it until I get a yes." Whereas really sometimes the best decision for the company is not right now. This doesn't actually fit our priorities right now, right? Or maybe yes, but let's right size the level of investment. So it might look like half whatever the size of what that recommendation actually was, and having the maturity to realize that, to put your idea into context is huge. That took me a really long time to learn and I think that goes under the umbrella of always do what's best for the company, not necessarily what's best for me, my career, my team, my wins. If you prioritize what's best for the company, that helps you have a more right-sized way of still advocating for your ideas, but doing it with a bit more equanimity. And also just connecting to what the company is. Just this idea of if the thing you're pitching is not aligned with what is important to the company right now, it's unlikely to be prioritized. It makes sense. This is why leaders choose, here's what matters most. We got to do the things that are going to help us drive this thing right now, like retention or revenue. And so that's just, I think, a sub tactic there is just whenever you're pitching something, connect that to the goal of the person you're pitching to so that they're like, "Oh, I see how this is going to help me. That's great. Let's do it. Great advice." And I think this is something a lot of people run into. It's just, "Why aren't they listening to me? Why don't they want... That's such a good idea. They hate me." It's something, "Oh, I bet they hate me. They don't trust me." When it's just like, okay, this isn't a priority right now. Let's come back to it another time. Okay. I'm going to get to a couple more tactics and then I'm going to shift directions to talk about managers and being manager. You have an awesome framework called MOO. What is MOO? What does it stand for and what is it all about? MOO stands for Most Obvious Objection. M-O-O. And the thought there is that a lot of times we're surprised by the questions that we get, especially in meetings where we feel blindsided, that was unexpected, and then we're on our back foot. When really, if you thought for even two minutes about what are obvious objections that I'm likely to get when I share this, you often immediately come up with what some of those things are. So are you going to be able to anticipate every single objection? No. But can you anticipate the obvious ones? Absolutely. And so this is where knowing your own argument in and out, including counterarguments becomes so important. So knowing your counterarguments as well as you know the arguments for doing the thing. When you do that, when you have prepared in that way, you're less likely to feel caught off guard.…

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