How Middle Managers Can Become True Leaders | Full Conversation

Hi, everyone.

I'm so excited to welcome you to Leadership Lab. My name is Sophia Czechowska. I'm the VP of People Strategy. And I wanted to first start by saying thank you for taking the time to come to our first Leadership Lab. Please join me in welcoming Simon Sinek, who's an award winning author and speaker, and our VP of engineering, Tao Rabiou to the stage. Tao will be interviewing Simon Sinek and there will be time for some questions. Please give them a warm welcome.

So I appreciate the warm welcome, Sophia, and I'm grateful to be here. It's great to be here with you, Simon.

Nice to be here with you.

Awesome. Awesome. All right, so I'm going to start with some questions, and throughout these questions, I'm going to attempt to intersperse a bit of my experience and perspective as a way of reflecting some of the things that I imagine my colleagues here are going through. And, and perhaps we punctuated with some Q and A at the end. All right. So early in my career, I felt like leadership is basically the way that you treat others. Like, you know, just how, how you act. And I think I'm a nice guy. And that's, that's how I showed up based on those principles. Until I met a manager of mine, his name is Grant English, who said, no, no, tal, listen, you got to study it like a science. Right?

So that said, I'm curious, your take on the distinction between manager and leader, it resonates with me personally. So what's the difference? And what does it look like to cultivate leadership as a skill, As a science?

Yeah, great question. And I think this is about pushing and challenging each other. And this becomes your first challenge because you introduced everybody as people managers.

But the problem is no one wakes up in the morning and wants to be managed.

Totally. Yeah.

People wake up in the morning and they want to be led. And the reality is you can't manage people. You can manage a process, you can manage a project, you can manage a schedule, but you lead people. It is a human function.

Yeah.

And the best leaders that I know, first of all, like I said, usually we treat management as a position or a rank in a, in a, in an organization. But leadership is a responsibility. And it's the awesome responsibility to see those around us rise.

Yeah.

And you are right, because leadership is a skill. Number one is we have to learn it. Most of us do the jobs that we're good at and we probably had some sort of training along the way. We may have gone to school for engineering or Being a lawyer or whatever it is, or if we didn't, the company will give us on the job training. And they have. Most companies have pretty sophisticated training programs, especially for junior people.

Why?

Because they want us to be good at the job. That's why. They look at our grades and how we did at school or how we're doing in the training program. And if you are good at your job, you will get promoted and you'll eventually get promoted into a position where you no longer do the job that you were trained to do. You now have to do a new job called leadership. And we often get little to no training on how to do that job. So you're 100% right. It's a skill and the skill must be studied sometimes. And I, and I expect that the company offers formal training as leaders make their way up the ranks. But also we have to take responsibility. And all the best leaders I've ever met study it. They read books, they read articles, they watch talks and they have conversations about it constantly. They are fascinated by it because it's the thing they're trying to learn. And they never ever think of themselves as experts. They always think of themselves as students.

Amazing. Amazing that the piece around people managers as a bit of a misnomer as to what we're trying to achieve here is it actually resonates. So perhaps that's a big thing. Everyone here is a people leader and maybe we strike that from. And I'm as a follow up, I'm curious around this notion that management becomes an ascension from a perception standpoint. But what about leadership? And is that in the domain of people managers solely?

So there's formal rank which affords you authority, but leadership has nothing to do with rank. As I said before, leadership is the awesome responsibility to see those around us rise and, and people will only follow you if they trust you and feel like you have their back. They'll do as you say because you have authority over them. Or they may have fear, but respect and psychological safety that leads to followership, which is when people give you their blood, sweat and tears, partially because they want to do right by the company, but largely because they want to make you proud. And so the question is, what conditions do you have to create that somebody would want to do something for you willingly and wantingly. So just to go off on a little tangent, if you're interested in this kind of thing, you can always interrupt me. By the way, I'm like a wind up toy. You just put a coin in it.

I'll do My best. I'll do my best.

So you can just as a quick aside, you'll appreciate this. So we've all been in meetings where somebody is talking, they've made their point, but they just keep going and going and going. And we all feel bad because we don't want to interrupt and we don't know how to interrupt or when. So we just sit there.

Or is this cute for me to interrupt you, Simon?

Yes, but. Or we go off the reservation and we're making a different point and again, same thing. So in our company, we came up with a thing called banana, which is if somebody made their point, anyone in the room can just say banana, which means that we get it, let's move on. And it's a very polite way of interrupting. So you can banana me anytime.

You got it? I will. I will work. I'll do my best to banana you others here as you go on.

So I was going to say how the psychological safety is created and what the actual anthropological. A responsibility of a leader is really quickly because this, I find this interesting. Way back when caveman times, human beings lived in populations that were rarely bigger than about 150 people. That was about the size of a tribe, right? Give or take. But it was that. Those are the map. That's where it kind of maxed out in that range.

And we have to help each other. We have to work together because human beings by ourselves, we're not strong. I can't kill a saber tooth tiger, defend myself against a woolly mammoth by myself. Not going to work out. But as a group, we are absolutely remarkable. We have to remember that we're social tribal animals. Our survival depends on each other. Which means if I go to sleep, I have to trust that you will watch for danger. Perfectly good system. And vice versa. We're constantly assessing and judging in our society who's alpha. Right. So if you're the strong one in the tribe, you can shove your way to the front of the line to get the food. If you're the artist in the family, you get an elbow in the face. This is a bad system because if you punch me in the face in the afternoon, I'm probably not going to wake you and alert you to danger. Right? Bad system. So we, we, we evolved into hierarchical animals where we're constantly in assessing and judging each other. Who's alpha, Right. And it can be based on whatever depends on the population. You know what, what we consider alpha status. And when we assess that someone is more senior than us in the organization, we Voluntarily step back and allow the alphas to eat first. Right. So no elbow in the face and I'm guaranteed to get some food. Now.

We'Re not stupid, right? We don't give our alphas first choice of meat and first choice of mate for nothing. There's a deep seated social expectation.

I'll take that. All right, so next question. So, Simon, the leadership lab that Sophia mentioned has as she, she discussed the Q3 topic called license to Challenge. Right. Which is we're thinking about as a form of psychological safety. And the belief here is that it can unlock innovation in our teams. We want to hear from them, we want them to throw out bananas and let us know when things are going awry. That's the spirit. Now, however, when we say psychological safety, it can very well mean different things to each of us. For example, I could say, isn't that simply just being nice to. I mean, we're all nice to each other. We do that. We know how to do nice. Etsy nice is what we call it. Right. Can you help unpack that for us? Like, what is psychological safety, truly? And what is it? What is it not? And why is it so fundamental to success?

Yeah, it's nothing to do with someone's personality. That's number one. Right. I've been in organizations that are so nice, but they're so nice that they're passive aggressive, that nobody gives you any feedback and nobody tells you anything because nobody wants to offend you. And. And as a result, people's careers just sort of, they just sort of live in the ether because nobody gives me damn feedback. Right. So nice can go too far.

Yeah.

Psychological safety is very simple. It means that I feel safe to say I made a mistake or I don't know, or I'm struggling at home and it's affecting my work or I'm scared without any fear of humiliation or retribution, without any fear that it's going to affect my career. In fact, I can say these things with confidence that the team and my leaders will rush in to support me. Yeah, we've all been on teams that have that. We've also been on teams, all of us, where you would never admit a mistake or say you don't know because you fear public humiliation or have it hurting your career. And so we spend our days lying, hiding and faking. So psychological safety is very clearly feeling safe to say those things.

I love that. And as a lead up to this meeting or this conversation that we're having, just as a proof point, I was super nervous as I As I told you, and folks who know me will be like, oh, that's. That's nonsense, Tao. But in admitting that a lot of improvements and tweaks were made along the way, I got this little clipboard from Andrea. She's like, hey, I'll print it out for you, pal. It'll be okay. I got some pep talks from, like, my peers here who's like, you know, Tao, you can do this. I'm like, okay, maybe 10, 15 minutes in, we'll see. But.

And I got you, too, Tao. Yeah.

And I love that because, you know, the notion of it being an abstract thing and you can't connect it to real world examples, and we don't want to talk about what the benefits of it, I think is worth mentioning. So I love the example, and thank you. Thank you for framing that in that way, especially the. The feedback piece. So that'll segue into my next question. So when I think about psychological safety, I believe that trust is a key piece right to this. Right. Which makes coaching and feedback, as you mentioned, much more productive. So, like, what's your take on what psychological safety looks like when it's done well?

And the inverse is what are signs that it's starting to grow within a team?

So the question you're asking is not dissimilar to how do I make a friend or how do I build a relationship? Which is clearly, you can't go on a first date and have trust and ask for a hand in marriage. It's ridiculous. Right?

But. And the dance that we do in building friendship and building trust in our personal lives can be somewhat short and somewhat long, but it's not instantaneous ever. And it's the same at work. There's no single decision that you can make or one thing that you do that all of a sudden everybody loves you and everybody comes along at a different time, Even on your own team. Right. We don't know what people's previous experiences have been, so there's a few things we have to remember, which is it's a process, and it's a little bit like working out, which is, you know, you're asking, how do I build trust? I'm saying, okay, if you want to work out and get into shape, you're going to have to do chest, you're going to have to do arms, you're going to have to do legs, you're going to have to do core. And you're like, great. Where do I start? I'm like, yes, just pick one. It doesn't matter. You're gonna have to do it. All right?

It's the same thing.

I'll give you some pointers. There's many other things, but just. It doesn't matter the order. Just please, just do one.

Go, go.

So number one, which I think is one of the most important things, and you demonstrated it, Tao, which is leaders have to lead by example. Just like children follow their parents, people on a team will follow the example of their boss. If the boss lies, yells, screams, always has all the right answers, guess what you're going to get from the team? You're going to get pushiness. You're going to get people jockeying to be right all the time. Right. The leader will set the example. And so it doesn't actually work when a leader says, hey, if you make a mistake or if you don't know something, tell me. I'm totally cool. I'm building psychological safety here until you do it right. Not gonna work. It's actually not gonna work. What actually does work is when the leader says.

I don't know. You're asking me a question. I'll be honest with you. I don't know. I don't know. Or I screwed up and I need your help to fix it right now. People are afraid of doing those things because it is that word that scares a lot of people. Vulnerable. Right. Because it's admitting weakness. But admitting weakness and being vulnerable and being weak and being vulnerable are not the same thing. Right. So I don't want anybody to ever say.

I'm so nervous. I'm useless at this. I can't. I don't even know. This is not going to go well. Right. Like, that will not inspire confidence. Own it. Be confident in the expression. So, for example, hey, I have no clue what's going on. I am so nervous. You have no idea. And unless somebody helps me, this is not going to go well.

Sounds familiar. Great, great.

But listen to the tone of voice. It's so different.

Yeah.

And if the leader goes first in pretty short order, you will find that people will start to take the risk to do the same, per the leader's example. And we have to welcome it that if somebody says, I made a mistake, we can't say, what'd you do now? You go, bring it on. I gotcha. What do you need? If somebody says, I'm struggling at home, you go, it's okay. Don't worry about it. We'll take care of the work thing this week. Don't worry about it. You know, so we have to. We have to we have to affirm those risks that people are taking.

Amazing, amazing. So I've seen a bunch of your stuff and I love the stories that come out of like the material hf. So do you have any stories of leaders that you've worked with who've done a great job of building like this psychological safety that you're describing?

I mean one of the best leaders I ever had young in my career. I was a junior, I think the official title was junior idiot.

Had a big ad agency. I filled the specs perfectly by the way.

And my boss, it wasn't actually my boss, it was my boss's boss. It was the big boss who ran the whole, the whole group. His name was Peter Intimaggio. One of the best leaders I've ever had in my life.

Peter, I wouldn't call him warm, he was very nice, but he didn't exude warmth, you know, so that goes to that nice thing like, you know, you don't have to be everybody's friend. Yeah, you have to be friendly, but you don't have to be everybody's friend. In fact, that's a different conversation. Trying to be everybody's friend actually undermines leadership. Different conversation. But Peter never answered a damn question ever.

Hey Peter, what should I do? What do you think we should do? You know, Peter, I've exhausted all the, that's why I'm coming to you, because I don't know. He goes, well, what do you think? Just tell me what you think. He never answered a damn question. And it was at times excruciating. What ended up happening is he taught me self reliance, he taught me to think for myself, but he also taught me to bounce ideas of other people because if I had to go tell Peter, who's my boss's boss, what my idea was, I better be pretty confident that I've, that I've battle tested it with a few people before he shoots all the holes in it.

Yeah, yeah.

So it taught me to ask for help. And this is, I think one of the mistakes people make, especially young people because we tell them to be self reliant and all this and they go and tell you their ideas because they want to prove, but they haven't battle tested it. And then we shoot ideas and then they say, well, you don't provide psychological safety. Right? So, so that's our job, which is to push and push and push with love, with, with support. But at the same time we're holding them to high standards so they better bring good work to us. I don't expect them to come with me, to come to me with right answers. I expect them to come to me with thoughtful answers.

Got it.

So. So Peter was one of the best leaders I ever had, and I don't think he ever answered a question, ever.

That's fantastic. All right. That's it. No more answers.

No more answers.

Yeah, just questions. Spirit of questions. I've got another question now.

Good segue, by the way.

Thank you. Thank you.

So you described Peter and his penchant for asking questions as a way of sort of triggering that for you.

Right?

Now. What are some surefire ways in which a manager can extinguish psychological safety? Where are the. Where are the minefields waiting for us? Yeah.

So.

There is a great story that Nelson Mandela used to tell.

He was asked by a journalist, Nelson Mandela is a very, very important case study in the leadership world because he is universally around the world, regarded as a great leader. Different people are viewed differently depending on where you go in the world, but not Nelson Mandela, which is why he's an important case, Right? Because it's universal. And he was asked by a journalist, how did you learn to be an effective leader, to be a good leader? And he tells the story. He told the story of his childhood. He grew up as the son of a tribal chief. His dad was a tribal chief. And he says, he said, I remember going to tribal meetings with my father, and I remember two things. They always sat in a circle, and my father was always the last to speak. Now, if you think about it, when we come into meetings, the number of times we sit at the head of the table versus sitting in the middle of the table, we create a hierarchy that's number one, as opposed to even on. Even on a. On a rectangular table, you can create a circle, right? And you think of the number of times we come into meetings and we go, okay, here's the challenge we're facing, guys. Even if it's somebody who's good and well liked and all that.

Here's.

Here's the challenge we're facing.

I want to get your point of view. Here's what I think. But tell me what you think. Yeah, too late. Too late. You've either biased the room or you've made people feel that their opinions don't matter. So it takes a lot of discipline for a leader to say, here's the challenge. Tell me what you think. And then shut up. And if it's quiet, don't say, anyone, Anyone, Anyone. Because people who need to think before they speak, not like me, who Just thinks out loud, Right.

You're doing great science.

Every time you say anyone, it restarts the system. So you have to get comfortable with uncomfortable silence and someone will break it. And you have to be good at leading the room. Now, what do I mean by that? Much is said in leadership about self awareness. You have to be self aware. I actually think that's very difficult. I don't know my blind spots. I don't know how people receive me. Right. Self awareness is actually very difficult. I think we have to practice situational awareness. That's more important.

Right.

So that when you're sitting in that room and you've asked for help, you've asked for ideas, one person's doing all the talking. Are you aware of that? Can you say, dave, love the ideas. Let's hear from somebody else. Or are you in the corner of your eye, are you catching the person who goes.

And you're like, hey, Stacy, you want to say something?

Yeah.

Or somebody who hasn't spoken at all. And at the very end, you go, hey, Tao, I know you have a point of view. I want to know what it is. And the point is that a good leader isn't leading the idea set. They're leading the room. And by the way, the leader may change their mind 0 based on their original thoughts or. But you'll make people feel heard. And you get all the benefit of all this new thinking. So you actually might learn something that actually might change your point of view. And then at the end, the leader can say, I came in here with this point of view, but I gotta say, this was more valuable to me, and I've changed my mind.

Wow. Wow. Amazing. Thank you for sharing that. And the takeaways here are again, back to the skill. There's a lot of intentionality in what you describe. Not just like, hey, just naturally hang out and high five or fist bump. No. And it's great that we have this series because I think it's going to be valuable for a lot of us to be intentional about those things that you talked about. Hierarchy, facilitating and not leading in the traditional sense. So I love that.

If I may. And if I may.

Yes, please.

This stuff is difficult.

It all requires practice. And you. You will rarely get it right the first couple of times. It is a process, like getting in shape. Right. It is a process. You have to trust the process. And of the people who are in that room, I highly, highly, highly recommend you find a buddy, at least one or a peer group, because it is too difficult to do this thing called Leadership alone, Right. It's like even parents, there's, you know, the traditional nuclear family has two parents, but even if you're a single parent, you still ask for help from your parents and your friends. You still, you still get feedback and input. Leadership is the same. Don't be so foolhardy to think that you can do this all alone. You need the mechanism to say, oh, I tried it today and it freaking blew up in my face. Even if it's just a cathartic venting, make sure you have a leadership buddy.

Amazing leadership buddy. I love the concept. All right, so following this, fireside managers here or leaders.

If I were to reframe it, they'll all have an opportunity to learn about the different levels of psychological safety. And the one to hone in on is Challenger safety. It's the highest form that teams should strive for. So, and to unpack that a bit is, it's, it's. The goal here is to allow us to thoughtfully challenge each other and push the status quo. Right. But why is challenging so difficult for individuals? What's your assessment here? What makes it really hard to create a truly safe environment to challenge in that way?

So there's multiple reasons. It's layered and messy, like, just like people are layered and messy. Right. I mean, some of it may have nothing to do with the leadership environment you've built. It may go back to someone's childhood. They just got yelled at all the time by their parents, you know, for anything they said they're going to carry that baggage with them for the rest of their lives. And so, you know, it becomes difficult just sort of anti their personality to do these things or we don't know the companies they worked at before, you know, that, you know, once bitten, twice shy. So we have to be patient that everybody comes along at their own pace and it's not bad or wrong. And no one is failing if they're not challenging. Right. So there's a few things to remember and hierarchy plays into it. Right. So for example, a marine general friend of mine, he says his test for a good leader is, is if the group has taken ownership of their lieutenant. So is it the lieutenant or is it our lieutenant? Right. And that's the first line leader. Now the leader that seven line, four lines away. It's always the colonel. It's never our. It's always the vice president. It's never our vice president.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so Challenger is very easy here because the relationship is close, it's intimate, it's daily, it's Familiar.

And we.

We need it here. Now, if you come up into a meeting and you've got a lot of people who are 2, 3, 4 levels in the hierarchy beneath you, the challenger culture you're going to get is be very difficult. Not because they're bad people, not because they don't challenge. There's either respect component or an intimidation component.

Interesting.

I struggle with it on my own team. Right. That I know my team challenges each other. I wish they would challenge me more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So.

So one of the things that I have to do is I have to push it and I have to invite it. So how do I do that?

Yeah.

Like, I'll say, like, one of my favorite tests is, okay, what sucked and what sucked less If I made. If I did a thing, I'm saying, all right, what sucked and what sucked less.

Right.

Or can you tell me specifically something I can do better? And it doesn't work in the hallway. It's got to be in a safe container, some sort of feedback mechanism. Meeting or simply saying, look, guys, I don't know the answer. I need your points of view. And one by one, they'll start, you know, where are my blind spots? Like, we have to set the tone. But just be aware that the hierarchy does factor in to someone's feeling of. Of. Of willingness. It doesn't mean you have a weak culture. But this, if you have no challenging here, that's a problem.

Got it.

So tell me a little bit your perspective on.

Approaches to break that sense of hierarchy. For example, we have one on one, skip levels, et cetera. Fireside chats. Josh will come up here, The ET Will come up here, whatever. But is there a different thing that we should be doing to sort of invite that level of candor?

So you can't break it, you can mitigate it. Right. So if Steven Spielberg walked into the room, you would show him incredible respect. Why? Because it's Steven Spielberg. Or in my world, George Lucas. Right?

Yeah, yeah.

I got like.

Love it, you know, so. So, like, I'd be like, oh, my.

God, it's George Lucas.

Oh, my God, it's George Lucas. And if he says, tell me what I did wrong, I'm like, oh, that's amazing. Right? Like, I love your stuff. I love you. I love everything you've done.

Right.

He can't break it, but he can make me feel a little safer and he can mitigate it. What's more important for Josh or any senior leader, what's more important is that they create a culture of challenge from Their. From their circles of influence, from the regular impact they have. So Josh creates a circle, a challenge culture, in his direct reports. Guess how they'll lead their direct reports. And guess how they'll lead their direct reports.

Yeah.

And so the most important thing is the culture you create in your sphere. And then it ripples. By the way, it goes the opposite as well. No, no challenger culture at the top. You're going to find only small pockets of it throughout the company.

Got it.

And we call those rebels, right?

Call those rebels or those. The people who have this weird, like, I don't care if you fire me, you know?

Yeah, totally, Totally.

Right?

I love it.

I love it. I appreciate that a lot. I want to do a quick time check. Sweet. Good. I'm good. So gonna shift to a lightning round unless I miss something significant. And if I did, I apologize profusely to you all in advance. All right.

What three characteristics make a great leader?

So this question comes up a lot. And, you know, you read articles, and they're like, charisma. You know.

I've known a lot of great leaders who you wouldn't even know they're the leader. They, like, walk with their shoulder against the wall. Right. So, you know, those things I've seen. Yes and no. But the few things that I've seen universally about amongst the great leaders I've met, number one, and these things, number one and number two, sort of go together. Number one is courage. Number one is courage. The courage to speak truth to power. The courage to be honest about my own failings, my own. My own capabilities. The card should be open about my. My failings and my capabilities. Like, these things are excruciating. The courage to tell somebody something that you know is going to hurt their feelings. Like these things. Leadership is an incredibly difficult thing to do. And courage, which then begs the question, where does courage come from? And I do not believe for one minute that courage is a deep internal fortitude where you dig down deep and find the courage. Courage, for me, is social.

Yeah.

Like, I have the courage to jump out of a plane because the parachute on my back, the external thing, gave me the courage. And so you need at least one person in your life, professionally or personally, to say, I believe in you. You got this. And if everything goes south, I'll be. I'll still be there with you. That'll give you courage. Number two, closely tied, is integrity, which is to do the right thing. And weirdly, we all know what the right thing is. Rather than doing the expedient thing, like I can't stand it when companies do unethical things and all the CEOs are dragged in front of Congress and they all say the same thing. We broke no laws. No, you didn't break a law by raising the price of your essential drug by a thousand percent. But it's pretty unethical.

Yeah, right.

Like, we all know what right is, and the law is a lower standard. And so the courage to have integrity and integrity driving my courage, like those things go, go together. And the third one, I'd say they're a student of communication because a huge part of leadership is the skill of listening and the skill of speaking in a way that allows people to not only to feel. Listening in a way that allows people to feel heard and speaking in a way that people can hear as opposed to triggering people, etc.

Etc. Got it. I love that. Appreciate those. Those responses. I got another one for you. All right. If you need this group of leaders, not managers, to do one thing this week to help them begin building trust in their teams, what would that be?

The first thing would be to go back to your teams and say, one of the things that I love about this company is that the company wants us to be better leaders, better leaders of people. And we had our first gathering that was all about challenging. And there's an expectation at some point that we're going to challenge you to think bigger, think better, push your boundaries. But that starts with me. And I've been challenged by the company to take myself on and be a better leader. Over the next few months, you're going to see me experimenting with techniques and strategies. Some of them will work, some of them won't. Some of them I'll be good at. And some of them I will fumble and stumble. Be patient with me and give me lots of feedback because I really want to be the best leader I can be for you. So make an announcement of the journey that you're on, because it is a bumpy road and you want your people to be patient and supportive as you're on your journey to be a better leader, which in turn benefits them.

Amazing. Something about that response resonated with me. And this is the aspect of. There is this.

Return of psychological safety that comes back to us as leaders when we provide it to our teams. And I'm wondering if I'm reading that right, given, like, what you described.

Yes, it is a relationship.

Yeah.

And we call you leader not because you have rank or authority. We've already established that. Right. We call you leader because you Went first. First towards the danger. First to speak of your mistakes, first to admit you don't know. And that courage to go first is why we give you all of the perks. We give you higher salary and all the other advantages you get as a leader. But those perks are not free. There's a deep seated psychological expectation that all the advantages you get in a leadership position come at the cost of you being vulnerable first and protecting the group.

Amazing. Thank you. Thank you. All right, slight twist here. Now, what's the one piece of common leadership advice that you think is flawed that you want to warn us about? Don't do it.

Well, that's a great question.

I think the, a lot of the old sort of Jack Welchian things we hear.

You know, do as I say, not as I do. False. Totally false.

Because I said so.

False.

Give people context for the decisions you make or the questions you ask, even the instructions you give.

Keep.

Can you do this? Here's why. Right. Like context is everything.

Yeah.

And I think, and this one I know is difficult for a public company.

But.

Shareholders do not come first ever. At best they come third after your employees and your customers. And if your employees or customers are taken care of, your shareholders will be taken care of. But if you share, prioritize your shareholder, you might hurt your customer or your employee. So I think that old fashioned dinosaur thought.

You can be performance driven, but it's for the benefit of the customer and the employee.

Yeah. And I imagine that spurs like engagement as a side effect.

And by the way, in this modern day and age where we've sort of accepted that shareholder supremacy is the thing to announce and publicly say, no, it's a recent thing. It's a kind of 1980s, 90s thing. It's not the thing. It's a thing that hasn't served our nation or the companies or the economy or the people who work in those companies, it's only served one group, the external group that doesn't actually care about us.

And we talk about courage. The CEOs who say, invest in us or don't invest in us, we will not be fair, weathered fans. But if you believe in our cause and you like our management, you like our strategy, welcome.

All right, I'm going to wrap this up with my last question. And so what is the one thing you wish? But before I do that, thank you for that response, Simon. It was great. I appreciated it and I imagine others did too. So what is the one thing you wish you knew about leadership when you were at the very Start of your journey of becoming one.

Oh, super simple. I don't have to know all the answers, and I don't have to pretend that I do. As a young leader, I thought my credibility came from my intelligence. I thought my credibility came from having answers to every question. I thought my credibility came from knowing what to do. Complete nonsense. The single best thing I ever learned that transformed me as a leader and as a person is the confidence to say, I don't know.

Amazing. Well, leaning on the very gracious Andrea, she has given me the cue that it's time to open for Q and A. Right.

Yeah. We're going to take a couple questions. We can start with the audience, and then if you're virtual, drop your question in the emcee and I'll read it aloud for you. We just have time for a few.

Hello. Hi, Simon. Hi, Tao. Just round of applause because this conversation was really inspiring.

So thank you.

Okay, I will make this quick. How can we encourage leadership from both different orgs or tribes? Because we're all around 150 here, breaking down the perceived gap of alpha between disciplines.

The perceived gap of what between disciplines?

So creative engineering, product marketing.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, one of the ways we organize companies is, as you've said, right. And there's a few techniques, some of them more formal, some of them less formal. More formal, which is create teams based on a project with a blend of them and put them in a. Put them in a room together and they have no choice but to work together. I love that. That's more formal. Less formal is the Kaizen technique from the Toyota Way, which is take somebody out of engineering and have them go work in marketing to help solve a problem and vice versa. And they bring all of that. They start to learn not just to present their ideas, but they learn the challenges the other group has. And the most important one is get people to talk like, you know, a. For a formal monthly quarterly meeting where the different groups present to each other. One of my favorite companies that does this really, really well is 3M in Minneapolis. And 3M is one of the most innovative companies that ever existed on the planet. The number of patents they have is extraordinary. And one of the ways that they do it is on a regular basis. It's not required, but it is very heavily attended. The engineers all stand on the stage and say what they're working on and say what's working and what's not working. They don't believe in failure. They believe you just whatever you're doing. Didn't fulfill the brief. So I'm trying to make a strong adhesive. I actually made a weak adhesive, and what they get is the support from each other. So I think a form where people can say, here's what we're working on and here's what's not working, and here's what we're struggling with, and everybody can hear what's going on. I just love. I love things like that.

Thanks for the question and thanks for the response, Simon. I'm going to read one from the mc. This question is from Alejandro. How do you break the bias of sharing an unpopular opinion when the majority is leading to one opinion?

Okay, great question number one. You have to disconnect.

The opinion you have from yourself, meaning it's not personal. And one of the things that happens that makes things go sideways is when we have a clarity or we have a different point of view, we take it really personally. Right? We want the company to do this. We want the group to do this. We want to be heard. And if they don't, we get upset. And we're like, why? I'm just trying to help. Right? But the point is, you made it personal. And what I've learned is when you shift accountability, because when you make it personal, you take on all the accountability, right? But when you shift the accountability, you're more likely to be heard saying it's completely sort of like, hey, I have a different point of view. I don't know if it's right or wrong, but it's challenging. Can I. Let me just make a point, right? And you say that point, and you get pushback, Right? And you, instead of defending the idea and. And trying to be right versus the pushback because now it's becoming personal, right? You're defending my idea, Right. You simply say, hey, look, look, look, look. I'm not going to fight. I'm not trying to be right. I'm not trying to tell you you're wrong. I'm literally not going to fight with you. This is your decision. You do what you think is right. I want you to have the benefit of another point of view. But if you think it's the wrong point of view, then ignore me. And I've learned that the more you can emotionally disconnect yourself from the advice you're giving, weirdly, the more often it's heard.

Love that. Any more from the audience in person? We've got some time. We're a little ahead of schedule. Nicole.

Sure.

Hi, I'm Nicole. I lead our DEI team at Etsy. And my question is to. Does all of this advice extend just as well from the work context to the personal? Or here we are in a pre election season political context that come into these conversations, come into the workplace.

The simple answer is yes.

Human beings are engaged in relationship, whether they're personal relationships or they're professional relationships. It's relationship and many of the same things, not all, but many of the same things apply. And rational versus emotional. Are you good at assessing when somebody's presenting an opinion or something emotional? And it happens all the time. We do it in our relationship, in our personal relationships, right? Somebody says to you, you know, you didn't do that thing three times. You're like, I didn't do that thing twice. Like, we correct the facts when they're emotional. Don't do that. Right. It's got nothing to. Or we have a rule in our company, if it's above a 5, it's about something else, right? So like at home it's be like, why do you always leave the fridge open? If that's the reaction to leaving the fridge open, it's not about the fridge, right? So to be a student of like assessing, like, is this the thing or is this something else? Don't, don't be rational in a. You can't bring facts to an emotional gunfight. You know, you have to. All you have to do when, when there's emotion is, is allow someone to feel heard. And, and when politics come in, which is so uncomfortable and destructive inside, well, inside everything.

Our goal is not to fight with the person or prove them wrong. Our goal is simply to hold space and make them feel heard. And that's a skill that we have to do better at. As employees, as brothers, as sisters, as spouses, as boyfriends, as girlfriends, and as Americans, we are crap at listening. And if you want to teach one skill in your company that will have ripples that will benefit society and people's homes beyond, beyond, beyond. Start teaching effective listening.

Nicole's taking notes back there. Okay, we have one more question in MC that I'll read. This is from Sonali. Should the leadership principles or guidelines change based on the changes in the company culture? For the. For example, if a company is getting more performance focused during a difficult economic time, why or why not? And if the answer is yes, how?

Great question. Absolutely. Leadership styles adapt to the situation you're in. Right? So there are some leaders who lead with command and control. Command and control is not useless. It's just not sustainable. And so if you're always like that you'll exhaust your people and burn them out and probably break levels of trust at some point. But in periods of extremely high stress, like Covid and going into lockdown and all of that extremely high stress, it is totally okay for a leader to go into command and control, but you have to have been that, that really effective sort of kind of leader that we're talking about to build the trust before that. Command and control doesn't work if you don't have the trust of the people. And so if you. I learned this from, from the Marine Corps. So forgive the, forgive the analogy, but, but you know, when you go into combat, leaders just bark orders. That's what they do. But they, what people don't see is that that's not what it's like back at home station. They've built trust over months, if not years, so that their, their people trust them when they go into command and control. And by the way, be open about it. When we went into lockdown, when we went into Covid, it was, I said out loud to our company, hey, listen, the stress is high and the pressure is extreme, and I want to know your feelings. I care about those things. And if I said something in an awkward way in a meeting and our traditional way of doing it is you sort of bring it to my attention quickly, I need you to know, bring it to me in two weeks. Like right now we're focused and people were fine with it, but I set expectations that it was going to be different and it was going to be short term. That's really important. So, yes, you can adjust your style for the situation you're in. What you can't do is be mushy. Mushy and, you know, super patient with when you, when, when stress and deadlines are extreme. But at the same time, you can't be command and control when the stress is normal.

Oh, we've got another question here in the audience.

So you talked about self awareness and how that's like one of the most difficult things to do. And you also talked about kind of people think of psychological safety sometimes as being like, positive. And you can have this problem where you have.

What I might call toxic positivity. And so I'm wondering how do we measure as an organization whether we're making progress on psychological safety when we think we, we're already good at it and see the problems when the culture is overly positive?

Yeah, so you're such a great question. Toxic positivity is thinking everything's good or telling everybody everything's Good. You know, it's sort of, I guess the equivalent of giving everybody, giving everybody a trophy. Right. And it's the unwillingness to ever.

Give difficult feedback. Now the question is, have you learned the technique to give difficult feedback so, so that people will hear it rather than be defensive and angry?

And so one of the ways you can judge, is it excessively positive? Are you actually creating psychological safety is ask, ask the people on a regular basis. Do you feel safe to admit a mistake? Do you feel safe to ask for help? Do you feel safe to say I don't know and see what people say at the same time, you'll see it in the product. You'll generally see if you have psychologically safety, you'll generally see the number of people quitting go down. You'll generally see innovation go up. You'll generally see more consistent performance. But you'll see it also just as the leader of the group is, you'll see your team teaming together, you'll see your team relying on each other. And the more that you step back, like I made an executive sort of decision the other day and I was sort of a little, not very clear about what the decision was. You know, I was like, we need to do this right? We're not telling anybody to do anything. And somebody said, well, what's the decision? And I said, I want each of the team leaders to go back, do experiments with their team and then tell me which is the best solution. And so the more you push out the opportunity to try and experiment, you'll get the benefit of all of that and you'll have a sense of it. But there's multiple data points that you'll need, some of them formal, some of them informal.

One quick follow up. So if there's no psychological safety, how are you going to get people to tell you that? There is the space to tell you that they made mistakes. Is it just like looking at people doing that? How do you know how much is enough versus yeah, so.

One of them is accountability, right? So is somebody checking in with you every time before they make a decision?

Hey, is it okay if I change this from blue to green? Hey, is it okay if I call one of our people, hey, is it okay if I send this out? Hey, is it okay if I give this report to your boss? Right. And the problem is the more we answer all those questions, we're actually removing accountability. For me, one of my biggest pet peeves is when we go on a company off site or vacation, that we're on our emails and checking in on everything. Nothing undermines trust more than you can't even go away for a week, and you don't even trust your team to make decisions while you're not there. You know, like, when I go on vacation, I tell my team, hey, I'm gone for a week. If there's an emergency, deal with it. I'll see you in a week.

Bye.

Right. And what that does is it says, I trust you, and you're accountable, not me. The more I answer their questions, the more I remove accountability from them, the more I. And by the way, accountability means sometimes they get it right, and sometimes they screw it up. And so when they get it wrong, is it stylistic? I just would have done it differently. We have to sort of learn to put our egos aside there. But if it went sideways, assuming there's no negligence, you know, like, that there wasn't, like, gross irresponsibility, That's a different conversation. But if something just went sideways, you go, oh, my God, that went sideways. Okay, let's figure this out. What's your first. What's your first suggestion how we can put this right? I got you. Let's just figure this out together. And the more of that that happens, the pushing accountability, we're not very good at. We're not. Because we're. We're constantly connected, which accidentally removes accountability from people.

Is this on? Okay, thanks, everyone, for the questions. I have the pleasure of wrapping us up, and so it's my turn to be nervous now. Tao. Just kidding. I just want to say thank you to Tao and thank you to Simon. I think they did an amazing job. Let's give them a round of applause.

Okay, thanks, everyone, for the questions. I have the pleasure of wrapping us up, and so it's my turn to be nervous now. Tao. Just kidding. I just want to say thank you to Tao and thank you to Simon. I think they did an amazing job. Let's give them a round of applause.