Hilary Gridley: belief

Transcript context

…I'm glad you went there. I wanted to actually follow this thread, which is kind of a different direction, but I think a lot of people are always struggling with this as a leader. When your leader disagree, it does say something that you completely disagree with, but you still need to represent that as, "Here's the thing we're doing." But you don't want to be like, "Oh, just because Nick said so." Because you lose power as a leader. Is there something you've learned about how to do that well when your leader tells you to do something you disagree with and you still need to get your team to do it. First, I do try to go through the what if I'm wrong exercise. I think a lot of people just sort of expect that if you ask somebody a open-ended question like, "Why are we doing this?" You're going to get a straightforward answer. And oftentimes the answer is not straightforward for various reasons. Maybe there's confidentiality reasons, maybe there's just somebody is acting on a hunch, but that hunch is informed by years or decades of reps of developing judgment, and they're probably really onto something. And it's not just this kind of arbitrary gut feeling. But whatever it is, I really try to get to the bottom of, let me really make sure that I have done my best to understand this person's point of view. And I have some sort of tools for doing that, which I can also talk about. But if I've done that, and I still disagree, I'm relatively candid about that, but candid in a way where it's still respectful. I think what you want to avoid is a situation where as a manager you're like, "Ah, I have no control. This sucks. This decision is so stupid, but that's a job, so we have to do it. " Obviously that's not going to set your team up for success or make anybody happy about it, but you do hear that, you do see that happening. And so I think what I try to do in those situations is separate out my opinion from it, from the, " Well, what is the insight that makes it make sense to this person" and explain their rationale. Even if I'm comfortable saying, "I don't necessarily think this isn't how I would do it," or "I don't even really agree with how they're thinking about it, but from their point of view, from their perspective, their professional experience, whatever it is, I could see how this makes sense. And they might be right. I don't think they're right, but they might be. Let's find out. We're not going to find out if we are all squabbling about whether this is a good idea the whole time. The only way we're going to find out is if we give it the best shot that we have and try to do it. And if we're wrong, that happens sometimes and we try again." I like that this comes back to your mental model orientation of, "Here's their mental model, here's what their experience has been like, here's how they see the world, the trends, and then this is why they think the way they think." And so instead of encouraging your team or yourself even to be like, "No, no, you're wrong here." It's more, "Okay, here's their data set, let's try this, and this will inform that data set and maybe change their mind."…

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