This YouTube interview (host Matan Hazanov with a guest) centers on a leadership turning point: a 360-feedback process that revealed the guest's aggressive, Type-A style would not scale. The guest describes shifting toward delegation, empowerment and softer people-management after processing blunt feedback; the broader lesson is that scaling a business requires deliberately building people culture and improving the first layer of talent, not just technical hiring.
Chapters
This was one of those slap in the face moments for me. I'm a type A person, hard charging. Okay? So you can imagine stylistically. So we got a coach for all of us in the mid-2000s, and he did a 360 process, right? Where you go and interview on an anonymized basis, 20, 25 people, colleagues, lateral people you report to, even personal, put all the feedback together, look for patterns, and then bring it to the person and start working on improvements. For me, I don't know if I was lacking self awareness at the time or I had just missed on this, but I got all the feedback of how my approach was not going to work as we scaled. It was just too aggressive, too hard, too sharp. And so I had a major change to leadership style in that era to be better at delegation, to be better at empowerment, to be basically nicer to people.
And if I could summarize, literally, that was the feedback.
That was the feedback. And so when all was said and done through that, I kind of go, we all had the technical chops. What we were never trained is how to deal with people most effectively. So I would summarize on scale up for us, it was, first of all, Anthony's recognition of improving the first layer of talent, the one layer down from him, and then all of us having to up our game and be better at people culture, empowerment and having the right people in the right seats, doing the right things, and the stuff about hiring and the technical chops of people and so on, we never had issues with that. It was much more around our style of building the right culture to scale. That was the big learning.
That's fascinating. I mean, that's probably the hardest thing to do. It's very hard to change one's behavior. Being aware, self aware, is one thing which is very difficult for most people to kind of get. You were in a situation where you were able to get that, but how did you take the steps to improve that? That probably required a significant change on your part, right?
Yeah, it's a very good question. Look, I think what I would say to you is I do very well with. Let's say you and I were sitting across the table and you were giving me that super candid. We got the barrier of trust, kind of. We cleared through the barrier of trust and we were doing something I do very well with a slap me across the face as hard as you can, knock me on the ground with the feedback, and then let me go digest it for a while, come back and then start talking it through okay. Hard. Pretty abrupt feedback for me is far better than good feedback. Oh, you're doing a great job. No, no, I want it straight and I don't. I actually like a bit of pain. So that guy did that in as constructive a way as he could. And I went back to him after. Look, I needed a couple of days to just process. And then you have choices in that processing. Do you double down on what you are doing or do you embrace, learn and so on?
