What’s your favorite idiom? One of mine is, “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
It’s amazing what you can learn with a little transparency. Yet, it’s not just about rooting out corruption, revealing core truths, or unearthing lies. It’s also a very effective tool in leadership.
I’m reminded of an early visit to the offices of then-fledgling startup, Twilio. I was the guest of a friend working there and he shared some of their cultural habits and ways of doing things.
One that stood out was that in their Monday all-hands meeting, the CEO would show the entire company their bank account balance.
The beauty of this is that there were no doubts about how the company was doing, how many months of runway they had left, or if a recent fundraise was actually finalized.
It was also incredibly motivating for the team.
As it turns out, knowing where the company stood kept the team humble and hungry. They knew their efforts mattered, and that they couldn’t just coast because they were “VC backed.”
As leaders, it can be tempting to hide things from your team. And sometimes you have to (like when planning layoffs), but in many other cases, erring on the side of transparency is the better approach.
This week, consider what you should try sharing with your team to be more transparent, and ask yourself how you expect they’d handle the information. Then, when you share it, see how it impacts them. Were you right or wrong?
This kind of experiment is exactly how you grow as a leader in what starts out as small ways (sharing one thing) and grows into big ones (sharing a lot more consistently).
With that in mind, let’s dive into this week’s topics…
Reminder! It’s your last chance to level up your leadership skills with a Lighthouse Lessons course.
Act now before they’re gone for good! Learn all about them and reserve your spot now here.
Table of contents:
- 🥘 Food for Thought on The Value of Your Disagreeable Givers
- 🧫 Culture Corner on Being Nice vs. Enforcing Standards
- 🗣️ Last Call Ever! for 3 Great Lighthouse Lessons Courses.
- ❓ Poll of the Week on Scaling Challenges and Culture Habits
➡️ Did a friend forward this to you? Get every issue straight to your inbox by signing up here.
🥘 Food for Thought on the Value of Disagreeable Givers
A friend shared this video (~14 min) from UPenn professor Adam Grant with me, and I found it to be a real gem:
To understand today’s Food for Thought, we need to establish some basics from the video (which is quite good, so I encourage you to watch it all, not just rely on my summary here - there’s a great tip in it on how to weed out takers and hire more givers, for instance):
"Takers are self-serving in their interactions. It's all about what can you do for me.
The opposite is a giver. It's somebody who approaches most interactions by asking, "What can I do for you?"
Building on that basic concept, the key lessons from the video are 3 things:
- Givers are both your BEST and your WORST performers. The best ones give and support others while still getting their work done, while the worst ones give so much and so often they don’t get their work done, or get walked all over.
- Takers are toxic to your team. As Grant describes, “the negative impact of a taker on a culture is usually double to triple the positive impact of a giver.” This is similar to how we have talked about the high cost of a**holes many times before. You have to root out this behavior to have a great team, because takers cause resentment, and create caution in everyone else worried about being taken advantage of or used.
- To truly understand givers and takers, you need to also understand agreeableness. It turns out, a helpful 2×2 framework aides you in more easily identifying the best and worst kinds of givers and takers. Grant shared this handy matrix:
Now, both types of takers are bad. One just takes longer to figure out, because they seem like a giver at first.
Yet, the important distinction I want to call out today is to recognize and embrace your “Disagreeable Givers.”
How Disagreeable Givers Help Your Team Thrive
Grant defines these people in a compassionate, and slightly humorous way:
“There are people who are gruff and tough on the surface, but underneath have others' best interests at heart.
Or as an engineer put it, "Oh, disagreeable givers -- like somebody with a bad user interface but a great operating system."
But what does that mean in practice?
Well, your disagreeable givers provide a priceless service to your team:
“Disagreeable givers are the most undervalued people in our organizations, because they're the ones who give the critical feedback that no one wants to hear but everyone needs to hear.
We need to do a much better job valuing these people as opposed to writing them off early, and saying, "Eh, kind of prickly, must be a selfish taker."
These people know that feedback is a gift. They’re protective of how they give, but they REALLY care. Sometimes more than anyone else on your team, or even you.
Here are a few ways a disagreeable giver may have been helping you and your team, even if they did so in a challenging way:
- Speaking up when a project isn’t going well, challenging everyone to alter course before it’s too late.
- Sharing critical feedback that will improve your project, product, or process, that deep down you know is right (like the Steve Jobs feedback in the next section).
- Calling out when someone is being a taker or a jerk, and hurting your team.
The core value in all of this is they will say what others often know or have mumbled under their breath (or in DM chats), but were afraid to rock the boat and say out loud.
If you’ve ever thought, “I wish someone had said something sooner!” that’s often a sign that either you don’t have a disagreeable giver on your team, or they’ve learned to not speak up.
Do you shoot the messenger? Do you seek the messenger?
The truth is, some disagreeable givers are particularly disagreeable. They can be quite blunt and direct in their feedback, which can be hard for anyone to hear.
As a leader, it’s your job to look for the nugget of truth in what they’re saying and first welcome and listen to that.
It takes time to develop a callus, so it doesn’t bother you, but it’s well worth it if you can turn that person into a trusted advisor, canary in the coal mine, and signal problems you’re not aware of.
Yet, that only happens if you avoid shooting the messenger. You have to thank them and reward their actions when they’re right. That’s how you keep your disagreeable givers sharing what you really need to know and hear about.
SEEK your messengers.
Whether your team is new or has a culture of not having tough conversations, sometimes you have to seek out the answers.
It’s what even Ed Catmull (quoted above) learned in making the great films at Pixar. People don’t always come to you on their own. Instead, you have to ask.
That’s why we’ve written about this subject many times. If this feels hard for you, I encourage you to start with one of these posts:
- Learn why an open door policy like Catmull had fails, and what to do instead.
- Build a habit of curiosity as a manager, so that you seek to understand, even when your team member is disagreeable.
- Use our hundreds of 1 on 1 questions to open doors and hear feedback and ideas you never would any other way.
And ultimately remember: You make the culture of your team.
It’s up to you to decide who you celebrate, and what you punish.
It’s your call how much you want to coach your disagreeable givers on how they deliver the message. You can always work with them on how they share their thoughts, opinions, and concerns, but watch out for them getting to a point where they feel like your rules mean they don’t want to bother.
Ask yourself some hard questions
This week, as you think about this topic, ask yourself some tough questions:
- Who are the disagreeable givers on my team?
- How do I treat my disagreeable givers?
- How could I cultivate their feedback to receive more of what I want to hear while coaching them to soften some of their rough edges?
- Who on my team are takers? How can I work with them to be more giving?
If you make it through those 4, even small changes can do a lot for your culture.
🧫 Culture Corner on Being Nice vs. Enforcing Standards
"The standards have to be enforced. If the standards aren’t enforced, then the standards slip. This is the role of the CEO in any company. Some care and some don’t. Great CEOs care a lot. Steve cared a lot."
- Marc Andreessen, VC at A16Z and former co-founder of Netscape
I came across this tweet and story on Twitter recently and knew it would be a good topic of discussion in a future edition of this newsletter.
Do you enforce real standards?
One of the hardest things about being a good, caring leader is enforcing standards.
If you’re a total jerk, then this is the easy part. You have no problem ripping someone to pieces and throwing subpar work in the face of a team member. Jerks don’t care about how their team feels.
Of course, the jerks eventually pay for it, because their team members grow tired of the abuse and either burn out or quit.
Meanwhile, for leaders who care (like those of you reading this newsletter), it can be hard to strike that balance between care and enforcement.
Strike a delicate balance.
Without heart, you’re just a jerk your team hates.
Without standards and enforcement, you’re just a pushover that cares about being liked too much.
While Steve Jobs is not a perfect model of striking the right balance, Andreessen does capture how Jobs got extraordinary results in this excerpt:
“Steve yelled. There is no debating that. He wasn’t the easiest guy to work for, but he was the best guy to work for. Apple couldn’t have accomplished all it has if Apple wasn’t a place where people loved to work.
Talk to the very large number of people who not only worked at Apple, but worked at Apple for a very long time, and they all say the same things: “I did the best work of my life at Apple. My work had the biggest impact. I built products there that are so much better than anything else I’ve ever done. I learned the most. And it wasn’t just me; I was surrounded by the best people.”
What they describe is a real sense of having something very, very special.
…Steve may have chewed people apart in a meeting, but afterward they almost always had two things to say: One is, he was right. What they’ll tell you next is that they learned “good enough” isn’t good enough. And the next time they came back to meet with Steve, they came in with something great.
It’s like anything in life. There are standards. The standards have to be enforced. If the standards aren’t enforced, then the standards slip. This is the role of the CEO in any company. Some care and some don’t. Great CEOs care a lot. Steve cared a lot.
…The experience most people had at Apple was not just “I had a meeting with Steve and he yelled at me.” The experience most people had at Apple was “I worked at Apple for ten years, and oh my God, did we do amazing things.”
What is YOUR team’s experience?
You don’t have to yell like Jobs did, but you do need standards. You do have to tell people what’s not good enough and hold them to it, even when it’s uncomfortable.
Most people reading this probably err on the side of being too nice. You give people the benefit of the doubt, make the occasional compromise when the project is less important, or even fix some of your team’s work because it’s faster than having them try again.
And in the short term, all of those approaches can work. They avoid conflict. They keep your team happy. And they put off uncomfortable conversations.
Yet, in the long run, you hurt both YOU and your team member:
- You: Are left spread thin covering for them. Your team’s results likely suffer. You have less time for other efforts and otherwise get held back.
- Your Team Member: Doesn’t learn what great is. They’re not given a chance to improve and grow. Or they stay in a job they’re a poor fit for longer than they should.
That’s a lose-lose scenario, all because you don’t enforce your standards hard enough.
How do you set standards without being a jerk?
No, I’m not telling you to start yelling in meetings like Steve Jobs. There is absolutely a way to hold people to a high standard and still care about people, as we taught in our Lead from the Heart course, and you can also learn if you read Mark’s book.
But before you review either of those, here’s a few tactics you can use that will help you:
- Make it about the work, not them personally: The first rule of coaching and improving people is to not make it a personal attack. It’s not “you’re sloppy with your editing”, it’s “this recent white paper you wrote had a lot of typos, grammar issues, and formatting problems.” This keeps people from being overly defensive and frames the issues as something they can fix.
- Give them a lofty reputation to live up to. As Dale Carnegie famously wrote, if you give people a strong reputation you expect them to perform at the level of, very often people will rise to the occasion. This is how you let people know that while their current work wasn’t good enough, you absolutely believe they can do better and meet your standards.
- Show them what great work looks like so there’s no confusion. Part of being a leader is being a good coach. That means teaching your team what your standards are and helping them reach those levels. You can’t expect them to read your mind, so roll up your sleeves and help them! If you’re not sure how to do that, start here with our step by step guide.
As you can see, there are ways to tell people, “That’s not good enough” that don’t involve yelling.
Now, these are still uncomfortable conversations to have, but they’re part of being a great leader. Standards only get upheld if you call out when they’re not met. Otherwise, you get a slow decay in quality based on what you keep accepting.
Ask yourself this week: What standards have you let slip? How can you raise the bar in a compassionate and effective way?
🗣️ Last Call Ever for Lighthouse Lessons Courses
Last week, we made our 3 most popular courses, The Coach’s Clinic, The Mindset of Great Managers, and The Secret Habits of Great Senior Leaders, available for you and your fellow managers to take one last time.
Those programs are gone forever once we change over to the new programs this Sunday evening.
If you missed out, you have 1 more chance, this week only.
You can master all the crucial skills of management.
This week, we have 3 of our specialty programs available that help you with those difficult to address problems that many leaders talk about, but few have solutions for:
- Mastering Motivation: How do you motivate all of your team members to do their best? What do you do when your “tried and true” method doesn’t work on someone? Learn the secrets to motivation and arm yourself with a variety of tools to reach and motivate anyone on your team.
- Mastering Managing Up: Your most important relationship is with your boss. They determine your resources, budgets, promotions, bonuses, and more. But how do you turn a poor relationship around or turn it from good to great? We show you how step by step.
- The 1 on 1 Master Class: You can call this our magnum opus. After writing dozens of posts on the challenges of 1 on 1s, helping thousands of managers with our 1 on 1 software, and having hundreds of live conversations, this course is all of our best insights, troubleshooting, and tactics to make 1 on 1s your management superpower.
Starting Monday morning, January 27th, you can buy any of these programs or all 3 at https://lessons.getlighthouse.com
A Few FAQs for You:
I received a few questions from interested managers I can also quickly answer for you here:
- How do these programs work? These are bite-size lessons sent to you once per week. They take about 15 minutes to read and then we give you an action to take based on the lesson. Start seeing results and put what you learn into practice starting with lesson 1.
- What time do I have to show up for each lesson? That’s the beauty of this program. You DON’T. No Zooms. No boring PowerPoints. Just lessons straight to your inbox that you read and act on at the time YOU choose. We even teach you how to build the habit to make leadership learning an easy routine.
- Can I take this with a group? Yes! We highly encourage this. When you buy the Group Edition you’ll meet weekly as a group to discuss the lessons. Leaders rave about these, because we give them a discussion guide that allows you to open it 1 minute before the meeting and then have an amazing discussion that builds bonds, supports each other, and gives you a chance to mentor junior managers.
- When do the lessons start? We’ll start the first group of orders the week of February 10th. If you have a conflict, or would like to delay, let us know when we send the post sale message out on Monday morning.
- What if I buy more than one program? You’ll take the programs one at a time, so you can take each program throughout the year. If you’d like a break during any of them, just let us know, and we can delay your start. The only requirement is that you start them all in 2025.
Ready to join us? Reply with your questions I can answer for you, or reserve your spot here
❓ Poll of the Week
Last week, we asked you about the challenges of scaling, and the results really stood out:
And it makes sense. If you’re trying to grow your team, especially rapidly, keeping the quality bar high for your hires is hard. No matter what you do, you will end up with some misses you’ll have to address.
Yet, just as hard is keeping your culture strong. Adding people, especially rapidly, can make it hard to stay cohesive as a team and maintain standards, which is why we tackled that question in today’s edition.
However, the most important is to embrace a mindset of change; just because you’re thriving at your current size and team structure does not mean things will be easy as you grow.
In fact, many things break as you scale, because they don’t work anymore. (For example, growing past 25 employees).
That’s why leadership can often feel like a moving target (because it is!). It’s also why it’s so important to always have a learning and growth mindset as a leader. You never know what thing you thought you knew well doesn’t apply in your current situation.
Reading books, talking regularly to mentors and peers, taking courses, and reading newsletters like this all become a crucial part of scaling yourself along with your team and company.
—
Now, this week, we look at a key part of a healthy culture: what you celebrate and reward.
What’s your favorite way to celebrate your team? Tell us now and see everyone’s responses in the survey here.
