Keith Yandell: belief

Transcript context

…I love it. This episode is brought to you by Coda. You've heard me talk about how Coda is the doc that brings it all together and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this firsthand because Coda does that for me. I use Coda every day to wrangle my newsletter content calendar, my interview notes for podcasts, and to coordinate my sponsors. More recently, I actually wrote a whole post on how Coda's product team operates. And within that post, they shared a dozen templates that they use internally to run their product team, including managing the road map, their OKR process, getting internal feedback. And essentially, their whole product development process is done within Coda. If your team's work is spread out across different documents and spreadsheets and a stack of workflow tools, that's why you need Coda. Coda puts data in one centralized location, regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can slow your team down. Coda allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate in one place. Take advantage of this special, limited time offer just for start-ups. Sign up today at coda.io/lenny and get a thousand-dollar start-up credit on your first statement. That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash Lenny to sign up and get a start-up credit of $1,000. Coda.io/lenny. Something else I hear about you, which I'm sensing as we chat more and more, and I could see why this is true, is that on the DoorDash kind of C-suite and board meeting and board in general, you play this really strong unifying force that helps the group come to fast decisions on really complicated topics. And I'm curious. One, would you agree with that? And two, what is it that you do that helps a lot of strongly opinionated people come to decisions on really complicated decisions? I hope that's true. I think that, for me, it all comes down to empathy. And what I mean by that is, you have to understand what different people's motivations are in the room. Different people are goaled on different things. People come from different life experiences and different work experiences. And I think it's really important to make each person feel heard. We had a situation, for example, where we were deciding between a trade-off between two business lines. It was a profitability question for one business line, to make one business line much more profitable to do a certain partnership, but it would come at the expense of the growth of another business line that was more nascent. And so it's hard when you get the GMs for all these businesses together, and they have very strong perspectives and good reasons on both sides about why path A is better profitability, path B is better for growth. And they're arguing very strenuously, in part because they want to hit their numbers, in part because they believe it. One thing I found super effective in those contexts is I try to ask the other side. So, let's take the profitability side. I ask them to make the growth case. I say, "Tell me the three best reasons why we should actually focus on growth here." That generates instant empathy for the other side. And sometimes, they'll even persuade themselves as they're talking and say, "I think you're right that we should focus on growth here. We can achieve this profitability measure later" or vice versa. And so generating empathy and having empathy for the other side, understanding how they're goaled and what they're bringing to the conversation, I think is the first step to having those really tough conversations. I love that. What other steps are there? I like that as a first step. Is there anything else you have that you end up finding is really helpful there?…

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