My Management Lessons from Three Failed Startups, Google, Apple, Dropbox, and Twitter

My Management Lessons from Three Failed Startups, Google, Apple, Dropbox, and Twitter

Kim Scott, veteran of Google, Apple, Dropbox and Twitter, shares what she's learned — especially the importance of giving a damn.

WHAT IT MEANS TO GIVE A DAMN

“The most surprising thing about becoming a manager is all the pressure to stop caring,” says Scott — and she doesn’t mean caring about the work, she means caring about the people. “I was excited about the product and the opportunity [at Juice], but also I was excited to build a team of people who really cared about each other and loved to work together.”

The morning she got distracted from the pricing decision was not an exception. Finding the time to focus on “the work” without being interrupted was a constant struggle. She even called her CEO coach at the time and asked, “Is my job to build a great product or am I really just an armchair psychiatrist?” She got her answer when her coach literally yelled at her: “It’s called management and it is your job!” “These words have always rung in my ears, every time I’ve been tempted to stop caring,” Scott says.

Management is a deeply, deeply personal thing.

“You have to be a human being. Some people think being caring and empathetic is a personality trait — but it can be learned. Especially when you’re hiring a lot of college grads, these people are talented and they’ll grow fast in their careers. You need to take time to teach it to them.”

Good management is about deep personal relationships, which can be hard to accept when you’re all about growing fast. As Scott says, the hardest lesson about giving a damn — about management — may be that it doesn’t scale. And that’s okay.

The Tactics:

“The simplest tactic around giving a damn is to push your managers to have career conversations with their people,” she says. “This isn’t about mapping out their path to promotion, it’s about really getting to know them as human beings.” And it’s actually two conversations:

“One person I talked to told me he really wanted to run a ranch,” Scott says. “Another wanted to spend eight hours a day riding his mountain bike. You may never know these things about your people unless you ask. And if you ask, you can figure out how their goals and values — freedom, hard work, learning, whatever — can connect to the work you want them to do over the next 18 months.”

CRUEL EMPATHY

“There’s a Russian anecdote about a man who loved his dog so much that when the vet told him he needed to cut the dog’s tail off he couldn’t do it all at once, so he did it an inch at a time. Don’t be that kind of manager.”

Giving unclear, infrequent feedback has somewhat of the same effect — though slightly less violent. You end up hurting the person receiving the feedback more, even though you’re just doing what your parents always told you empathetic people do: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all.

This is where Scott says she’s seen managers make the most mistakes. “No one sets out to be unclear in their feedback, but somewhere along the line things change. You’re worried about hurting the person’s feelings so you hold back. Then, when they don’t improve because you haven’t told them they are doing something wrong, you wind up firing them. Not so nice after all…”

In order to give people the feedback they need to get better, you can’t give a damn about whether they like you or not. “Giving feedback is very emotional. Sometimes you get yelled at. Sometimes you get tears. These are hard, hard conversations.”

Scott breaks giving feedback into four quadrants. On the horizontal axis you have unclear to clear feedback, and on the vertical you have the spectrum of anticipated emotions from happy to unhappy. The gentler the feedback, the less clear it tends to be. That’s the cruel empathy quadrant. The one you want to be in is the top right — clear even if it’s bad news.

Tough love is how you build trust the fastest.

“When you’re hard on someone but they really hear you, that’s when you build trust over time,” she says. “They’re going to react emotionally. All you can do is react empathetically. Don’t try to prevent or control someone’s feelings.”

The Tactics:

As a manager, it’s also critical that you solicit feedback. But this isn’t as easy as it sounds. A lot of managers simply forget to ask. And very few people want to or will offer truthful feedback to their managers. Scott has some recommendations for this too:

PROVIDE DIRECTION

“The biggest thing I’ve learned about providing direction is that you do it with your ears and not your mouth,” Scott says. “The biggest mistake I’ve made and seen other managers make is that we’ll walk into a meeting with the team and say, ‘Here’s what we’re doing this quarter, or this year,’ and people are like, ‘No, that’s not what we should be doing.’ It turns out we haven’t listened to what people want and think we should do.”

So, first you have to listen.

Next, you have to decide. To make sure everyone’s voice is heard, you need a cycle of debate and clarification. “Debate and clarify, debate and clarify,” Scott says. “This can feel tedious and political, but you have to go through it to get to the right decision. Teach this to your team of managers so that no one ever goes into a room again saying, ‘Here’s what we’re doing,’ without going through this cycle.”

Then you have to communicate. "But don’t spend too much time communicating because if you’re a great communicator, people will start to tell you where they disagree, and it’s time to start listening all over again..."

The Tactics:

The Big Decision Meeting. Scott created this after recognizing all the angst around her staff meetings. Everyone wanted to be included because they felt like big decisions were getting made there, but this was hardly ever the case. “Make fewer decisions in your staff meeting and create a second meeting explicitly to deal with important decisions,” she says. “Delegate these decisions to people who are closer to the information.”

Consider using your staff meeting to set the agenda for the big decision meeting. Identify the three most important decisions that need to get made that week, and who should make those decisions. Who is closest to the work involved? “This is how you push decision-making into the facts,” she says.

Citing James March’s book A Primer on Decision Making, she recommends that managers exclude themselves from big decisions as much as possible. “Somehow people’s egos get invested in making decisions,” Scott says. “If they get left out, they feel almost a loss of personhood. So you get ego-based decisions instead of fact-based decisions. The more you push yourself and your managers out of the process, the better your decisions will be.”

Most of all, don’t let decisions get pushed up. “A lot of times you see decisions get kicked up to the more senior level, and so they get made by people who happen to be sitting around a certain table, not the people who know the facts. Don’t let this happen.”

Use meetings with reports to invest them in the company’s direction. In one-on-ones, let your employees set the agenda. “Don’t let it just be an update — they could email you that. Instead, ask and then listen: What do they want to be doing? What are they not doing? What do they feel like they ought to be doing?”

Block off a whole hour for each report every week. You don’t have to fill the time, but they should know it’s there if they need or want to. Try to have the meeting over a meal, or in a more casual setting. “This is why it’s important to limit reports to five to seven per manager. This type of time and attention doesn’t scale,” Scott says.

If you're going to be a great manager, you can't have too many reports.

Outside of one-on-ones, set a quarterly meeting with absolutely no agenda with each person you manage, she recommends. “Take a walk or grab a drink. Just talk about life. This is where you will learn the important things.”

TAILOR YOUR LEADERSHIP

In the book The Fountainhead, there are two characters: The architect who is destined to change the face of the city, and his best friend, the electrician — the unsung hero who brings the city to life. To Scott, they are representative of the two major types of high-performing employees: People on a steep growth trajectory, and people on a more gradual growth trajectory.

“At too many companies, people on a gradual growth trajectory are treated as second-class citizens. This is a mistake,” she says.

People on a steep growth trajectory need to be managed in a very particular way. “You need to make sure you’re pushing them to take on new challenges. Make sure you are defining their path to promotion. Make them your thought partner. Don’t ignore them because they are independent. Don’t ignore them in the spirit of not wanting to micromanage them.” At the same time, these employees can be high-maintenance. They are unlikely to stay in one place for long.

“The people on the more gradual growth trajectory, they are the ones who will be in a role for a while,” Scott says. “You have to honor them for the great work they do, because too often they go unrecognized.”

The Tactics: