A CEO describes how casual remarks get treated as orders once you're in charge, even when you're unsure about the topic. They learned to stop making offhand comments and started asking for explicit feedback instead, to keep their team speaking honestly.
Yeah. One of the most shocking things about becoming a CEO after being a product manager and I was a manager of other people as a product manager, is just the difference in how people treat you and perceive you when you're the CEO. You know, I'm used to as a product person, like, in influencing without authority and convincing engineers and my boss that something was worth doing. And when I became a CEO, I would literally just mumble something under my breath, and then the entire company changes to adjust to what I thought was just an idea I was throwing out there. And it's really crazy. And also not a great way to work, because I'm not really that good at anything. And so, like, I don't really want people following what I say for the most part, like, it'll be wrong, especially if it's, like, design, because I think I'm good at design, but I'm not good at design. So what was important to me was, like, really changing the way I work and seeking feedback from people and really drawing it out of them. So instead of saying what I think at all, I just ask people what they think about things, realizing that, like, as soon as I say anything, people take it really seriously. And if it's something they disagree with, they could get really upset but still feel like they have to do it. So it's just a very different way of working when you're actually the boss. And it's important, I think, to really understand that and make sure that you are drawing the feedback out of everyone else, because they're not going to give it to you proactively in the same way that they felt comfortable, like, shitting on me before my entire career.
