Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I think that most leaders, especially technical leaders, assume they have to have all the answers. People have climbed the ladder in whatever realm they're in because they've been dependable, reliable, the smartest person in the room. But when you're leading a quickly-scaling company, you quickly have less context than the people you're around. And the way you were operating before doesn't work because you don't have the ability to wrap your arms around every problem in a deep way. So, I've seen leaders at every phase from frontline managers up to running an 8,000-person company struggle with knowing when do I have to have the answer, and when I don't have the answer, what options do I have? But great leaders know that when you try to advise and have the answer all the time, you're not actually equipping your team to go solve the hard problems. You're training your team to come to you with all of the hard problems. And coaching is a different way. It's an alternative path that unlocks brilliance in your team and is way more motivating for the people around you. So, coaching is actually a learnable skill, obviously, because there's tons of coaches around Silicon Valley, but you don't have to coach in the same way that an executive coaches. You can shift your energy into curiosity when someone brings you a hard problem to solve, and create space to get curious, and help them solve their own problem. So, obviously, sometimes advising is the right path. If there's an urgent issue, the person coming to you doesn't have the skill they need, that's a time to advise and help. But leaders over-rotate, assuming the people that they've hired who are experts in their domain need them to solve the problem. So, I think it's useful for your listeners to actually know that coaching's an alternative, and I can help them learn some basic skills around this. Okay. I'd love to learn those skills. What this makes me think about is there's this famous Harvard Business Review piece. I don't know. It's like 30 years ago maybe about the monkey on the back. You know this piece, where it's- Say more. I think I do.…

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