Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…So feedback is either constructive or complimentary. Constructive feedback is there's something you're doing that is problematic, and the purpose of it is let's move to a problem solving conversation like with Andy and me. The purpose of complimentary feedback is, wow, that's the third time you've handed in that report early and completely, and you even went above and beyond and did this and this. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that, how lucky I feel that you work for me. And if I'm telling you this, because if there's ever something that you want that we're not giving you, I want to make sure you know that I want to talk about it. By the way, same formula. Now compare that to nice job, thanks, right? All feedback is data. So all feedback is positive. More data is always better than less data. I agree. That's a great lesson there. To maybe make this even more practical for listeners that are maybe working on a product and say they have to give feedback in a product design or to a colleague who did something wrong. Is there an example that you could share of just in the workplace. I'm glad you asked that, because first of all, we're not talking about performance feedback and we're not necessarily talking about feedback on a task. What we're talking about is interpersonal feedback. And the reason it's so important is that if you don't take care of that, then that other feedback becomes unresolved. When you leave the interpersonal stuff unresolved, then the other feedback doesn't go well because the real problem is that I'm still pissed off that you never answered my phone call. So now I'm going to make it all about how this feature really is never going to work. Here's an example. Somebody walks into... A manager or a team leader or whatever, walks into a room meeting, starts a meeting by say, so I want to make sure we hear from everybody. I want to make sure that we have a very full conversation. I want to talk about X. And now let's say that I start to say something and before I have finished, he says, yeah, and the other thing we should talk about is blah, blah. And then a little later a similar thing happens. I start to suggest that there's another way to look at this and he turns back to somebody else, what somebody else had said and never says anything in response to what I just said. And I'm being very specific here, very behaviorally specific. And then after a while, what happens to me is I feel less and less inclined to offer up anything. Now, maybe he doesn't care, but if he cares because he started by think he wanted to hear from everybody, then I'm not being very caring if I don't tell him what the impact was of his behavior. So I don't call him out in the middle of the meeting because I don't want to embarrass him, but I might go to his office later and say, "So, John, do you have a few minutes?" I have an observation. I've got something that I experienced that you might want to know. "Sure, Carole." So when I started to say x, you did y. When I started to say z, you did it. I said, and when that you started the meeting by saying you want to hear from everybody. When that happened, I felt less and less... I felt shut down, and I felt less and less inclined to offer up my opinion. Maybe that's okay, but I wondered whether you knew that that was the impact. And I'm telling you, because as far as I am concerned, in that meeting, you did not accomplish your stated desire. Your desired outcome was to hear from everybody. And after a while, I just gave up trying to give you my...…

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