Paige Costello: preference

Transcript context

…Everyone I talked to about you is like, "Oh my god, I love Paige." I could see why, but I want to ask you a question. I imagine you've made some mistakes either with a product or your career. I'd love to hear a story of something that went wrong and what you learned from that experience. This might be the last question, depending where you take it. I would say that all of the advice I've given so far is directly related to things I've learned the hard way. So, especially as an IC moving into a management role, you aren't supposed to have all the answers. You need to ask better questions. You need to be thoughtful about direction and agency. So I would say one of the missteps here is knowing how to give guidance or direction in a way that doesn't feel like micromanagement because what you're trying to do is to teach a repeatable pattern instead of giving a precise instruction that can be used once, and then disposed of. So I think that's a pretty common manager path issue, but I think the faster you learn it, and observe it, and use techniques to manage it, the better. So, for example, I would go to my meetings with a stack of Post-Its, and I would write what I wish I was saying on Post-Its and see if someone else would say it first. Then, if by the end of the meeting, I had decided that I still had a Post-It or two that was worthwhile, I would say them. But you've got to police yourself because no one else will do it because no matter how accessible you think you are, other people know that you're the boss. They're not going to necessarily speak over you or challenge you directly. Another challenge I had is I'm a very optimistic person, and I like to look on the bright side. I'm very positive, and I think depending on the culture you're working with or depending on your team, sometimes they need to hear what's really bad, and they need you to be really real, and they need you to tell them like it is. Something I realized was that I had an experience where I didn't realize that people didn't think I was being authentic because they thought something was bad, and I wasn't talking about it, but it wasn't because I didn't think it was bad or didn't see. It was just because my nature was to say, "Well, I'm not going to talk about bad things because we're doing the things we need to do." As long as the plan is good, I wasn't really highlighting all the problems I saw or really pushing on those head on with my team, and so they felt like they didn't know what I was seeing or if we were saying the same things. That was really an interesting experience. Yeah, there were just so many. Yeah. With that second lesson, is there something you've changed in the way you lead and operate where you now found a way to communicate, "Here's wrong," in a way that's still maybe optimistic and productive?…

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