Annie Duke: preference

Transcript context

…Imagine a place where you can find all your potential customers and get your message in front of them in a cost-efficient way. If you're a B2B business, that place exists, and it's called LinkedIn. LinkedIn Ads allows you to build the right relationships, drive results, and reach your customers in a respectful environment. Two of my portfolio companies, Webflow and Census, are LinkedIn success stories. Census had a 10X increase in pipeline with the LinkedIn startup team. For Webflow, after ramping up on LinkedIn in Q4, they had the highest marketing source revenue quarter to date. With LinkedIn Ads, you'll have direct access to and can build relationships with decision-makers, including 950 million members, 180 million senior execs and over 10 million C-level executives. You'll be able to drive results with targeting and measurement tools built specifically for B2B. In tech, LinkedIn generated two to five X higher return on ad spend than any other social media platforms. Audiences on LinkedIn have two times the buying power of the average web audience, and you'll work with a partner who respects the B2B world you operate in. Make B2B marketing everything it can be and get $100 credit on your next campaign. Just go to linkedin.com/podlenny to claim your credit. That's linkedin.com/podlenny. Terms and conditions apply. There's an implication here you touched on a bit that there's a DRI essentially, there's one decision maker. Sometimes people start to feel like, "Oh, my voice isn't heard. I don't have a lot of say, I can't be part of this decision." And you talked a bunch about just how to make people feel included, you get feedback along the way. But any advice there if you try to move to this model of making people feel like, "Okay, I actually have impact on where this goes"? Yeah. So here's the really wonderful thing about moving from a coercive model to really, I guess you could say a model of curiosity, right? You want to be curious, not coercive, which means that the way that people in the meeting are talking about what their opinions are is in the mode of conveying information, not trying to convince anybody. So once we move away from that coercive model, and when I say coercive, I'm not saying anybody is purposely trying to set up a culture of coercion. Sometimes that's true, but for the most part, everybody's trying to do a good job and nobody's trying to set up a culture of coercion. But as soon as you say, "Are we all in agreement? Are we all in alignment?" And as soon as you're allowing people, and I'm sure you've been in these meetings, right? If you allow people to interrupt, if you allow people to say this, "I think you're wrong", "I disagree", "Here's why", those are all very coercive things to have happen. Interrupting someone is silencing them. Saying, "You're wrong", well now, you become tribal and people aren't going to be open-minded and they're going to stake their ground and it's all really bad. So let's move away from that. Number one, that's already going to help. But when we think about the way that meetings normally happen, again, there's all this crosstalk and some people aren't speaking and some people are and so on, so forth. And then of course, not everybody feels equally heard. But when you work as a nominal group, let's talk about something as simple as we're going to make a forecast of how long it's going to take to launch this product feature. Okay. So I'm going to send out to everybody, what's your point estimate? What's your lower bound? What's your upper bound in terms of timeline? And you could do it in some way, like how many sprints do you think is going to take whatever language you want to use? Now, everybody independently now gives their forecast with a rationale for why they believe that. And then you come into the room and you run a discussion where everybody's getting to say what their estimate was and why they believe that, and people are getting to ask questions. "I have a question" always is a clarification, it's just I don't understand. And as the leadership, the way that you would do it is, let me give you an example from a real one because that'll be easy. I did one of these discussions for a question about remote work, like what did the company want in terms of remote versus hybrid and that kind of thing. And so there was a lot of disagreement about whether whatever the policy was, it should be consistent across functions. Lots of disagreement. So let's take somebody who was on the, no, it shouldn't be consistent across functions. So they now say why they believe it shouldn't be consistent across functions and they say things like, "Well, different functions have different requirements, right?" t be consistent across functions. So they now say why they believe it shouldn't be consistent across functions and they say things like, "Well, different functions have different requirements, right?" So there's some functions that have to be in the office, like if you're IT as an example, but there's other functions which are more collaborative and creative and whatnot where it makes sense for people to be in the office, whereas engineers doesn't really matter, right? So there's different needs of different functions in terms of how much they need to be in the same space. So I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with this, I'm just saying what somebody said. So now as a facilitator, I never say, "Oh, I agree." What I say is I just want to make sure I understood what you said and I reflect it back. So I say, "So what I heard you say is that not all functions are created equal in terms of how well they work remotely or how well they work in person or what the flexibility might be. So what you're saying is there're functions that have to be in person. Period. And then other functions where that collaborative element being in the same office would be more important versus some functions where being remote is totally fine. Is that what you meant?" And then they have the ability to say, "Yes, that is what I meant" or, "Actually, I meant something slightly different. Let me say what that is", and then I reflect that back. Okay, so literally you're just going around, you're calling on people to do that, and then you're reflecting back what they say without offering your own opinion. I don't know, Lenny. Tell me how someone doesn't feel heard in that situation.…

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