Mastering Difficult Conversations with Google's Dir. of Engineering, Sarah Clatterbuck | Greymatter

This episode of Gray Matter is in partnership with sfelc, a curated community of engineering leaders working to evolve the way leadership is implemented in the tech industry. At the annual SFELC Summit, Google's Sarah Clatterbuck shares how to manage difficult conversations. So our next conversation is about managing difficult conversations. Who here has had to have a difficult conversation? Who here has been woefully unprepared? I know, I feel you. So we have an incredible keynote in Sarah Clatterbuck, who's gonna be coming up and sharing some insights. And so to get you acquainted with Sarah, she joined Google in 2018 as the director of engineering. Currently, she's managing four different teams focused on alternative monetization strategies for YouTube creators. She's previously worked at companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Apple. But her true passion is inspiring young women to get involved into stem. And so she served for over five years on the Northern California board for the Girl Scouts. The best part about that is she served on the STEM task group to help them get more young women involved in stem. So that's incredible. So, leading our conversation on managing difficult conversations, please join me in welcoming to the stage Sarah Clatterbuck.

Can I give you all some feedback? Actually, maybe this is feedback for me too. Us engineering leaders are terrible at difficult conversations. I think the only kind of difficult conversation we're actually prepared to have is to say something like, I really think you've painted yourself in a corner with the singleton pattern here in writing on a code review. But anything involving human emotions or things that make us feel uncomfortable, where we might have to look someone in the eye and deliver a difficult message, this is where we are woefully prepared. Ill prepared. Okay, so I'm going to age myself here substantially. How many of you had an NES growing up? All right, I'm not the only one. When I was in the sixth grade, it became my ambition to obtain an NES after having played on the weekend at a friend's house. And my parents, who were actually quite skilled at difficult conversations, sat me down and informed me that I would not be receiving one from them. But I was free to earn one with my own money if I wanted to. So it took me about a year to save up enough and buy a system, which then led to what was my first video game addiction, Super Mario Brothers. And today, video gamers have kind of a nice advantage. They can just go on YouTube and look for tips and tricks and moves that they can use to pass through the levels of a game. But back in the day, we didn't have that, you had to know somebody who lived on your block who might be willing to come over and play with you and show you how to beat all the different levels. So we're going to go back in time and I'm hoping that I can be that person for you today, walking you through the different levels and worlds of difficult conversations. First up, we have awkward conversations. Now what is this? This is, you know, your colleague has lettuce stuck in their teeth right before they're going to give an important presentation. Or maybe someone on the team has a horrible gum smacking habit that's driving everyone nuts, but nobody wants to tell them that's an awkward conversation. So I had an experience with this. I was at a company event and myself and three other colleagues were preparing to give a presentation in front of the company. And we were all backstage, pacing back and forth, going over our lines before the whole thing started. And it was three dudes and me because that's how we roll in tech. And so I'm walking back and forth and I'm about to pass one of my colleagues and I notice that his fly is super obviously open. And I'm like, oh man. So I figure, well, we've got 15, 20 minutes. One of the other two dudes is going to take care of this. But no, we get to like 2 minutes till go time and we're still in the same situation. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to have to have the awkward conversation here. So the next time we pass each other doing our pacing bit, I kind of lean in and quietly say, hey man, your fly is down. Crisis averted. He didn't have to go in front of the company that way. But basically every gamer will tell you that there's self talk that you have to do in addition to knowing the moves to get through the level. So the self talk that you need to give yourself when you're preparing for an awkward conversation is that your discomfort is less important than your colleague's embarrassment. Right? You're going to be saving them from a much bigger discomfort than you're about to have. So that's the self talk. So what's the script for this? Well, it's really simple. You're just going to tell them. Ideally you're not going to tell them in front of other people because that would defeat the whole purpose of having the awkward conversation. So you're going to be discreet. And my sort of power up tip here for this level is that you can practice on friends and family. It's a lot less awkward to tell your spouse or your kids or your friends that they have lettuce in their teeth. So do it all the time. Be that person that's going to have that conversation. And this actually wins you a lot of points with your friends because you save them embarrassment. Your colleagues appreciate it. This is like instant trust building. That guy knows I have his back if we ever work together. He'll never doubt that. So, moving on to level two, alignment. We get in misalignment a lot in the industry, in companies, in organizations. It's just a natural part of doing business. And misalignment can occur because teams are working on different metrics that all of a sudden start to clash into each other and cause friction. Maybe one team is depending on another for something, but the priorities are misaligned, so the other team's not going to deliver in time for that team to do their work. And these are just natural occurrences. And we have to be able to have the conversation when misalignment happens. So there's self talk here too. For this type of conversation, the first thing is you need to be able to walk in your colleague's shoes. This is often going to happen with peers, most likely where you're going to have a misalignment. And you need to be able to phrase the argument from their standpoint, not just from your own standpoint. You also need to realize that it's not personal. While you may feel a great deal of frustration and your team may feel a great deal of frustration because you're unable to move this conversation forward, this is just a natural part of business. And it's not like this person is trying to sabotage you and your work. They're just trying to meet their metrics. So the script goes in three parts. Basically, you're going to state the misalignment openly, you're going to empathize with your peer, and then maybe you're going to seek to get some input. So it might go something like this. Here's a typical misalignment over technical direction. And I find that it usually helps to state their position first to demonstrate your empathy. So I might go to my colleague and say, hey, you've actually been optimizing on this project for developer ergonomics, and I've been optimizing for performance. And these are different trade offs and they're both really important. But they've led us to make different recommendations and we seem to be at an impasse. What can we do to try to get into alignment and Then you can kind of wrap the conversation up with, hey, if we're unable to reach alignment, maybe we can go together to the next level to get more input on our decision. So that way you're kind of suggesting that it's okay to escalate and get input together if you need it. So the next level is a type of difficult conversation that I don't think we have enough. We aren't really known for our humility in technology, especially here in the Valley. And this is the apology. And you are going to make a lot of apologies when things go wrong in business and otherwise. And in case nobody's told you, you actually own accountability for everything your team does, in addition to everything that you do. So even if your team screws up, maybe they do something you're not even aware of, you're actually in charge of that, you have accountability for it. As you grow in leadership, you're going to get used to making apologies a lot. One thing to realize is that if you are willing to apologize and do it quickly, it'll actually diffuse a lot of negative emotions that might be happening. That's the self talk. So what does the script look like? Well, you're going to own it on behalf of your team and you're going to own the remediation for the problem. And then we'll talk about a power up move here. So something like this might happen. Hey, we disabled those integration tests because we thought they were flaky. And now that caused a huge production issue which has really negatively affected our users. I'm really sorry about the impact to the business. What I'm going to do to make sure that this doesn't happen again is that when our team encounters flaky tests, we're going to fix them right away. So there is a power up move here and this is to actually ask for forgiveness. And this power up is actually reserved for times when you've actually caused personal harm to someone in business. So let's say you're running a team meeting and a microaggression happens at the table and you as the leader just sit there kind of in stunned silence and let it go by. And then later you realize that actually someone on your team has been hurt by this and you caused them harm by not doing anything. This is the type of thing where you can ask for forgiveness. So in that case you're going to own what you've done or not done. In that case, what you're going to do better in the future and you're going to say Hey, I hope you'll forgive me. Will you forgive me? And that can be incredibly powerful in remedying things that have gone wrong in relationships in business. So now we're to feedback. And I think this is the one where everyone associates difficult conversations. This is where someone on your team has a behavioral thing that's holding them back and you'd like to give them feedback. So the self talk here is that especially in the US we are very tempted to do this thing. It's called a shit sandwich. It's basically where you put the feedback between two complements. I'm happy to report that the Europeans do not suffer from this problem. They go directly to the negative feedback. But what happens when you do this is that it dilutes the message and it leaves the person totally confused as to whether they were like, totally awesome or need to fix something. Right. And when you're giving feedback, your whole goal is to help them be better at what they do. And so you really want to focus the conversation on that feedback that you'd like to give them that will help them improve. And so there's three parts to this script. I actually learned these in my very first management course, and they have served me incredibly well. Basically, you're going to note the behavior that's holding them back. You're gonna explain why that behavior is causing an important problem, and you're gonna ask them to reflect back the importance of that behavior. And then you're gonna let that person actually own the remediation to the problem. So it might go something like this. Hey, I've noticed that you're often off by an order of magnitude on your estimates, and as we all are at one point in our careers. But the latest time this happened, it actually delayed our launch of the new app, and we had to cancel all of our pr and it means that the company has to maintain the old app longer. Do you understand why this is so important that we were off so dramatically? And then you let that person reflect back, and then you ask them, what's your suggestion for making sure that this doesn't happen in the future? And I found that if you let the person kind of reflect and own how they can make it better in the future, they're more likely to stick to a change in behavior than if I suggest to them what I would do. Right. It's an ownership. So last up, we have agonizing conversations, and these are conversations where you're going to have to deliver news to someone that's going to negatively impact their life, even if it's just for a short time. And I hope many of you have not had to do these kinds of conversations yet, but you're almost certainly to encounter them in a career as a leader. And this is something like you're going to lay someone off, you're going to fire them, maybe there's going to be a major reorg that's going to completely change what they're working on or their pay grade or something crazy like that. So the big thing here in terms of self talk is to really empathize. And I think most of us faced something like that in our careers. If you haven't, congratulations. I hope things stay that way. But you probably also know someone who's been affected by one of these situations and you can kind of feel those feelings that you had for someone close to you or that you had yourself before you have this talk. And then the script is going to go as follows. You're basically going to acknowledge that the news that you have to share is going to be something that they don't want to hear. That's going to be incredibly difficult. And then you're just going to stop talking after you deliver the news. And you're just going to let the person respond how they respond. And I think listening is very underrated as a conversation skill. But give space for the person to react to. Maybe they're going to be silent, maybe they're going to be angry, maybe they're going to be sad. You don't know. And then once they've had time to process, you're going to offer to help and you're going to mean it. So I have a happy story coming from an agonizing conversation in my past. Basically I had a big reorg going on and I didn't know exactly how the reorg was going to come out, but I knew that several of the folks on my team, that the roles that they had were not really going to be the same anymore. And one person in particular had a role that just wasn't going to exist in the new organization. And so I had to deliver this news. And fortunately we had the luxury of time where I could deliver the news and offer to help and actually extend that help over a period of weeks. And it turned out that in talking with the engineer, we felt that a change of ladder might be interesting, there might be another ladder where they could really apply their skills. And so I was able to go to leaders in the organization on that ladder and say why I thought this engineer would be amazing in that role. And Would they be willing to mentor the engineer? And so when the whole reorg went down, that's the transition that took place. And I'm really happy to report that the engineer has actually achieved at least one promotion since switching ladders in that transition. So these things can come out well in the end if you offer to help and you mean it. So I hope I've given you some tools to rescue Princess Toadstool and save the mushroom kingdom. Or maybe just to survive the different levels of difficult conversations. Thank you.

Thank you, Sarah. This one from Anonymous. Do you have any advice on how to get people to express themselves about topics? I have a report who does great work, but response to any question is whatever.

So one of the things that I've suggested for people who aren't able to express themselves, and a lot of us are introverted as engineers, is to start writing. So that was something I didn't mention in the asking for forgiveness, like if you're not comfortable doing that face to face, sometimes you can do it in writing. And so if I have folks on my team who feel sort of cornered by a question and aren't able to sort of express themselves on the spot, I might suggest like, hey, why don't we start a document where you can write down your different opinions and then we can share it with the team. And sometimes that helps people move into expressing their opinions when they can't do it verbally for whatever reason.

Wonderful, thank you. Another question. How do you talk to somebody who's a step four who doesn't admit to any faults, passes blame to others, or does not admit that there is any performance problem?

Yeah, this might be a power up. So I was actually doing this talk for a friend last night and she asked me the same question. I think it's basically repeat yourself at least three times first. So if the person hasn't heard you in the first conversation, make sure to have that same conversation at least three times because sometimes repetition will stick and then if it doesn't, sometimes it can help to bring other opinions to the table so that that person knows that you're not alone in that opinion. But maybe there are others who have the same feedback to share with them. So more of like an intervention style of feedback. That's what I would recommend starting with.

Thank you. Let's give Sarah a huge round of applause. Thank you.