Deb Liu: evaluation

Transcript context

…What did you take away from that experience that stuck with you to other work that you've done about keeping people excited and onboard with some radical change like that? Well, I think the biggest thing I learned from that entire experience is that people are people, but they respond to the process and respond to culture in different ways. People would go back and forth between the two companies and completely go native. They would adapt immediately because you just had no choice to get through a process, to get through a system, you had to do that. And so you realize that this is the same amazing people you worked with on the other side of you with different incentives, and they were still the same amazing people you could go have drinks with, but their incentive system was completely different. Now it was like, "How do you get through this process? How do you get booked? How do you get support?" And I realized that sometimes we often blame individuals for things that are actually systemic process problems. If there's a process broken, we think, well, if they just try harder to work better together, they just had a better relationship. And I'm like, "No, actually are you setting up a system where you're putting two people against each other and you're pitting them against each other and then saying you should collaborate better." I realized that there were so many amazing people who went back and forth over the years. I went from one side of the integration, I ended up on the other side of the integration and just to see how the perspectives were completely different. To be on both sides of an integration meant that you could see why one team felt the way they did and another team felt the way they did, but they were completely immersed in their own ecosystem. Sometimes we think that if we just had hired the ideal person, it would fix everything. But we never look at our systems, our processes, our cultures and say, "What are we doing wrong? What are we rewarding? How are we asking people to do their jobs?" And saying, "Actually, this is not about the people, it's about the water they swim in." That's such an important point, and a reminder of just the power of incentives and processes and systems and how that more than anything influences how people work. Is there a story or an example that comes to mind of how that went well or didn't go well or something that you changed or someone at eBay or PayPal changed to take advantage of that insight?…

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