How to build deeper, more robust relationships | Carole Robin (Stanford GSB professor, “Touchy Feely”)

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:00):
Many people told you your class at Stanford made them feel like their entire college tuition was worth it.

Carole Robin (00:00:05):
Even more rewarding for me are the, "I'm pretty sure your class just saved my marriage."

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:11):
I want to talk about how to give feedback well.

Carole Robin (00:00:12):
I feel that you don't care and I feel you're being insensitive are not feelings, and that's where we make our biggest mistakes when it comes to feedback.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:19):
How do you avoid people getting defensive?

Carole Robin (00:00:22):
Questions that start with what, when, where, how. Stay away from why.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:25):
I think it might be helpful to talk about this concept that you call the three realities.

Carole Robin (00:00:28):
We don't understand that we are only privy to two out of the three, so I know what's going on for me and I know what I did. I have no idea what happened on your end.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:37):
That's a really profound point that anger is a secondary emotion. Really what's going on is you're afraid or you're hurt.

Carole Robin (00:00:43):
What a disservice to not help people understand that anger is a distancing emotion and there are other emotions that are connecting.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:54):
Today my guest is Carole Robin. For over 20 years, Carole taught the legendary course at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, nicknamed Touchy Feely technically called Interpersonal Dynamics, which helps people learn how to build strong relationships and become much more effective leaders. She then went on to start a non-profit called Leaders in Tech, which brings these same lessons to leaders of high-tech growth companies, and she also wrote an incredibly impactful book called Connect, which distills all the key insights and lessons from her decades running this course. I've had so many friends go through the Stanford course or the Leaders in Tech program, and every single one of them was transformed in terms of how they relate to other people, how they communicate, and how they lead. In my conversation with Carole, we talk about why we're often trapped in mental models that we formed when we were younger and how they now limit us and limit our potential and our ways of seeing world.

(00:01:49):
Why disclosing 15% more than you naturally feel comfortable will make you a more effective leader? Why there are actually three realities around us at all times and how that insight changes the way you relate to people. We also get into how to give feedback to anyone about anything, why vulnerability is so essential to great leadership, how to build exceptional relationships, and why they're so important and so much more. This is a very special and very unique episode and I am so excited to bring it to you. With that, I bring you Carole Robin. After a short word from our sponsors, and if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation A/B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams.

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They use AI to get closer to user intent, so they have search and chat products that let users describe what they're trying to do in their own words and then see personalized results like customer walkthroughs or actions, and they do pop-ups too, but their nudges are based on in-product behaviors like confusion or intent classification, which makes them much less annoying and much more impactful. This works for web apps, mobile apps and websites, and they work with industry-leading companies like Gusto, Freshworks, HashiCorp and LaunchDarkly. Over 15 million end-users have interacted with CommandBar. To try out CommandBar you can sign up at commandbar.com/lenny and you can unlock an extra 1,000 AI responses per month for any plan. That's commandbar.com/lenny. Carole, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

Carole Robin (00:05:19):
Thank you so much for having me, Lenny. I'm delighted to be here.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:05:22):
I've heard from so many people over the years how much you and your course have impacted their life, both friends of mine, and also people when I shared on Twitter that you were coming on the podcast, so many people left comments just like, "Oh my God, that course and Carole's changed my life in so many ways." So I am really excited to have you here. I'm really honored to have you here.

Carole Robin (00:05:23):
Thank you.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:05:43):
I wanted to start with when we were preparing for this podcast, you shared this quote with me. You told me that "I was put on this planet to help people learn that it's possible to learn how to build and develop robust, meaningful relationships." What are robust, meaningful relationships and why are they important to you? Why are they important to people?

Carole Robin (00:06:05):
I think that most people experience a richer, fuller, more meaningful life when they have at least some high quality relationships or maybe put the other way. If you have none, it's unlikely you're going to experience quite as rich and full a life. So I often talk about relationships exist on a continuum. At one end of the continuum is contact and no connection, or we could also say dysfunction. And by the way, contact no connection. Those are thousands of Facebook friends. Those are not relationships and those are not friends in my vocabulary. At the other end of the continuum is what my co-author David Bradford and I came to call exceptional, and exceptional relationships have a particular set of characteristics that I can get into if you want to. But before I even do that, we're not suggesting, and I'm not suggesting that everybody needs to turn every one of their relationships into something exceptional.

(00:07:05):
That would be, first of all, impractical, second of all, unnecessary. But it turns out that the skills you need to move along that continuum actually take you from contact and no connection and dysfunction to at least functional and robust. And then once you've acquired those skills, then you can decide whether or not you want to take a few of those relationships a lot farther, take them all the way to exceptional, but at least you've gained what you need to know in order to get to functional and robust. And I believe if we had a critical mass of human beings on this planet who had those skills and knew how to get to at least robust and functional, we wouldn't just have more functional teams and organizations, we'd have stronger communities, we'd have more functional schools. We might, in my wildest dreams, even have a more functional government. And so that's my life's mission.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:08:03):
Hopefully this episode is going to actually do exactly that, help people build from-

Carole Robin (00:08:07):
From your mouth to God's ears.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:08:10):
To give people a little more motivation to really dig in and pay deep attention to this. What are some of the benefits you've seen from people moving further along the spectrum, building more robust relationships and more exceptional relationships?

Carole Robin (00:08:23):
Obviously, I taught a course for many, many years at Stanford Business School, and it was the Stanford Business School, by the way. It wasn't hidden away somewhere in the psychology department. And that's because the premise of the course is that people do business with people not ideas, not products, not machines, not tactics, strategies, not even money, they do business with people. So you better get the people part right if you really want to succeed. And that interpersonal competence is a determinant of both personal and professional success. So, to your question, I've lost track of how many hundreds of emails and calls and visits I've had from former students who come to tell me I just became a CEO. I'm pretty sure I owe it all to you. I just raised my third round. I'm pretty sure I owe it all to you.

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I just figured out how my co-founder and I are going to navigate this very difficult situation we're in. Thank you for everything you taught me, and those are exceedingly satisfying. And I'll tell you, even more rewarding for me are the, "I'm pretty sure your class just saved my marriage." I just reconciled my relationship with my brother who I hadn't talked to for two years because he voted for X and I voted for Y. We don't need to get into who X and Y are. And now I get thank you for finally writing a book because my VP of product didn't go to Stanford and doesn't understand what I'm talking about. So at least I bought them a book and now I've got more and more folks sending people to Leaders in Tech, which we can talk about later, which is the nonprofit I started after I left Stanford, so that more and more people can learn this from more than just a book.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:10:19):
Amazing. And I think what I love, you also shared this point that many people told you that that one class at Stanford Business School at GSB was made them feel like their entire college tuition was worth it from that one class, which is so surprising because it's called Touchy Feely, it has nothing to do specifically with business.

Carole Robin (00:10:38):
Except of course it has everything to do with business.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:10:41):
So to follow that thread, can you just talk about what this class is trying to do, what the goal of this class is and what actually goes on in this class? And again, people call this class Touchy Feely. I think it's technically called Interpersonal Dynamics.

Carole Robin (00:10:57):
That's correct.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:10:58):
Okay.

Carole Robin (00:10:58):
That's correct. Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:11:00):
Yeah. What is this class all about? Help people understand what goes on here.

Carole Robin (00:11:03):
Well, first of all, it's a quarter long class at a really fundamental level we've already really talked about what goes on there. People learn how to be more interpersonally competent or how to connect with other people in more functional ways. And what I mean by connect is learn how I need to show up in order for you to trust me, in order for you to feel closer to me, in order for you to want to spend more time with me in a leadership. By the way, this is part of the leadership curriculum I taught, in a leadership sense that makes you more likely to want to follow me because in the end, that's the question leaders should ask themselves, "Why should somebody follow me?" And you know what? You could study other leaders. Why did somebody follow Steve Jobs? Why did somebody follow Ursula at Xerox? Why did some people follow Sheryl Sandberg or why should somebody follow me? Because I'm not any of those people. So the question I ask my students to sit in and now my Leaders in Tech participants to sit in is why should somebody follow you?

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Now, there are lots of reasons why people might follow you. You've got a great vision that's very inspiring. You have a product that they want to bring into the world. They think they may make a lot of money if they hitch their wagon to you. Those are all good reasons. But if you want to build a sustainable long-term legacy, then you probably want to think about showing up in a way that other people come to see you as a referent figure, somebody in their life that they say, "When I grow up, I want to be more like that." And that is a form of power. There's a lot of research that supports this, referent power. You're a referent figure, and then people are much likely to be open to your influence, and open to working harder, and open to doing some of the things that you believe are going to make you great as a whole organization.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:13:27):
The class is quite unusual in that there's not just a bunch of lectures and talks, there's a lot of experiential pieces where you have to do quite uncomfortable things in order to learn how to do this well. Can you share an example or two of some of the things you put people through, whatever you're able to share?

Carole Robin (00:13:45):
Sure. I mean, I think that we don't learn to be... And I don't learn how to connect with you by reading about it in a book, which by the way is why it took us four years to write our book because at the end of every chapter there's a, here are things you can go do with what you just learned in the reading. And likewise in the class, the lectures are scaffolding on which you can hang your experience. But most of the learning happens in these small groups called T groups. The T stands for training, not therapy. And sometimes people think they sound like therapy, and they sometimes even experience them as feeling a little bit like therapy, but that's not what they are. We call them training groups. And what happens in that group is that there's 12 participants and two facilitators, and they are, for example, given a task, I might pair two students up and say, okay, you've got 10 minutes.

(00:14:51):
Allow the other person to get to know you. And that's the only instruction I give. Okay, so now you and I look at each other and we're like, "I don't know what the heck that's supposed to mean." And then maybe I share something about myself or maybe I ask you a question or who knows what I do with that, and then who knows what you do with that? So after 10 minutes, then I stop them and I say, okay, so take a moment and recognize that you just had a bunch of choices that you actually probably never even think about. You had a choice whether you began by sharing something or you waited for the other person to be in. You had a choice whether you began with a question, which was a nice, safe place to be, or whether you began with a disclosure.

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Then you had choices with regard to how you responded to what your partner did. And the whole course is about having interactions and then having the guidance and the space and the time and the focus to unpack what just happened. So now do you want to have a more conversation with this person or less? Are you intrigued or are you like, "Can I just get paired up with somebody else?" But now we get to talk about it. And then I put them into a second conversation and I say, okay, now having learned that, by the way, one of the ways we build relationships is through disclosure, through allowing ourselves to become more known. So that's a little mini lecture. And then I say, okay, now go back into your pair and see whether or not you want to make some new choices.

(00:16:33):
And then of course, that's all I always say, confidentiality is a very important aspect of all this work. So in the pair conversations, in the group conversations, I call them the Vegas Rule. What happens if Vegas stays in Vegas. And so I don't ask for any specifics, but I'll ask them for, was there a qualitative difference between the first and second conversation? And they inevitably say, "Oh my God. The first conversation is the conversation I have in the bar all the time with somebody." And the second conversation was a little more uncomfortable, but I sure feel a lot more known, and I think I know my partner a little bit more and now they've had a little taste of what it's going to be like.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:17:18):
Amazing example. So what I want to do with the rest of our chat is basically go through many of the lessons and insights and lectures that you give in this course. Obviously, they're not going to be able to practice the way they would practice in a class. But before we get in there, let's actually talk about, so there's this course at Stanford, and you also now have a program called Leaders in Tech where anyone can participate. They don't have to be going to Stanford Business School. Talk about what this is and how people can participate if they want to go deeper on the stuff we're going to talk about.

Carole Robin (00:17:47):
So Leaders in Tech is a nonprofit that two of my co-founders and I started, I guess in January of 2018. We started it with a program called The Fellows Program, which is a 10-month program that starts with a four-day retreat that's like Touchy Feely on steroids because Touchy Feely is a quarter long class, and then it continues on a monthly basis for a day or half a day a month to get the rest of what we might call Carole Robin curriculum because I also taught a course called High Performance Leadership. I also called Taught Leadership Coaching and Mentoring. So there were other things besides Touchy Feely. Then what happened was that our fellows who went through our first couple of cohorts said, because the Fellows Program is open to founders, either current or previous founders or co-founders of a company that has not gone public.

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And what we're trying to do is we're trying to influence the cultures of the future of Facebook's and Google's of the world, not the current ones. And so that program has a more limited number of people that can apply to it. However, one of the things that happened was we got a lot of people who said, but I'm not a founder and I still want that. And we also had fellows who went through the program that said, what about my people, my chief people officer, my VP of engineering? So then we'd started just a four-day version of the Touchy Feely, which anybody could apply to. I mean, actually not anybody. You do have to be a manager of some kind, and you do have to be in tech for now.

(00:19:37):
So that's where people get the real on the ground experience. They all get a copy of the book, and of course, if you don't want to go through the program or it's not the right time or you want to start somewhere else, you can start with the book. But if you just buy the book and you read it and you put it back on your shelf, you're not going to learn anything. Don't waste your money. If you're going to buy the book, buy at least one other copy and give it to somebody with whom you actually want to develop a stronger relationship and read it together and do the activities at the end of every book, and then you start to get a taste of what it's like to go through the course.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:20:18):
So just to close the loop there, how do people learn more and apply and join this program?

Carole Robin (00:20:21):
Www.leadersintech.org.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:20:25):
Awesome. And around the time this episode comes out, there's a deadline roughly around that time?

Carole Robin (00:20:31):
There is. Around when this episode comes out. So we do these four-day retreats all year, so there's no deadline to apply for that, but if you're interested in the ten-month program that starts with the four-day retreat and then has all that additional stuff, then deadline for that is May one. Actually, it might even how many days? It might be April. I don't remember how many days there are in April, but it's either the last day of April or May one.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:21:00):
April 30th.

Carole Robin (00:21:01):
Yeah, there you go. So it's probably April 30th. So check it out. You have to be nominated in order to apply. Don't let that stop you. If you look at it all and you decide you want to apply, just apply and say, Carole, I listened to Carole Robin on this podcast, you told me to apply.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:21:23):
Okay, great.

Carole Robin (00:21:25):
Don't waste time trying to find somebody to nominate you.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:21:27):
How amazing. Okay. Or you're going to be flooded with applications.

Carole Robin (00:21:31):
Again, from your mouth to God's ears.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:21:35):
Okay, so let's get into a lot of the stuff that you teach. So you mentioned progressive disclosure, so that might be a good place to start. What's the lesson there? What is it that people get wrong? Why is that important?

Carole Robin (00:21:46):
So first of all, when we disclose, we make ourselves more vulnerable, and vulnerability and disclosure tend to be reciprocal. If I hold my cards really close, you're going to hold your cards even closer. So one of the things to learn to do is to experiment. And what works with one person isn't going to work without somebody else necessarily because every relationship is its own fabulously interesting and always unfolding dynamic is to experiment with allowing myself to be a little bit more known, and then seeing what happens and whether or not you reciprocate. Now, a really important concept we teach that you and I have talked about before is called the 15% rule. And what that is that we all have a comfort zone. Imagine a circle in the middle called the comfort zone, this picture's in the book, and that we don't think twice about what we say, and then there is a danger zone, which is a circle way on the outside.

(00:22:57):
So these are concentric circles if you're not watching the video, and I never in a million years say that or tell you that, but there's this really important circle in the middle, which is called the learning zone. In academia, they have to have fancy words for very easy concepts, it's called the zone of proximal development. But basically it means that's where you learn. And you have to step outside your comfort zone in order to learn anything, and especially in order to create a deeper connection with somebody. However, my students used to say, "But Carole, the minute I step outside my comfort zone, how do I know I'm not in my danger zone?" I hear this learning zone, but how do I know I didn't go too far? So we came up with the 15% rule. So step a little bit outside your comfort zone. If you step a little bit outside your comfort zone, you're very unlikely to freak yourself or the other person out.

(00:23:53):
But you'll know, you'll feel it a little bit, you'll be like, okay, I feel just a little uncomfortable saying this, but I think I'm going to try. And then depending on how you respond, then we settle into a new comfort zone, a slightly larger circle, which is our comfort zone with each other. Then we can go 15% beyond that, and that's how we learn and grow and deepen our relationship. The same thing by the way applies to feedback when we get into that later. So we have to step outside our comfort zone in order to deepen and strengthen relationships.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:24:27):
What are some examples of stepping outside your comfort zone, disclosing what is it that you find people maybe aren't disclosing enough of or areas they should disclose? Is it challenges they're having in their life?

Carole Robin (00:24:38):
Well, of course, context matters. It depends on who I'm talking to. And by the way, disclosure, I want to underscore a concept that we also very much teach, which is appropriate disclosure. If I'm the VP of marketing and I get up in front of the troops and I say, "Well, third month in a row we've lost share and I have no idea what's happening or why or what to do about it, and I'm feeling pretty crappy about myself, I'm not even sure I should be your VP of marketing." That might be vulnerable and disclosure, but it is not appropriate Vulnerability and that it's not what we're talking about. The flip side of that is that I get up in front of the troops and I pretend nothing is happening. That doesn't build my credibility either. So I can get up and say, okay, probably no secret to most of you, that's the third month in a row, we've lost share.

(00:25:39):
And man, I wish I could stand up here and tell you I know exactly what's happening and I know exactly what we should do about it, but I don't, and I have never needed you all more. Now, who would you rather follow? So I think in business, and for a very long time, leaders were socialized to, first of all, leave all feelings in the parking lot. I've got an anecdote I often tell about my very first job, which I'm happy to tell you if you want. And there's no place for vulnerability or for sharing feelings. Are you kidding, feelings in the workplace? Now, I ask you, how do you inspire anybody with no feelings? How do you motivate anybody with no feelings? How do you become seen as a real person with no feelings? Why should somebody who is a robot who is robotic follow you? And the answer to that sometimes in the valley especially is because they're going to follow you for a while because you've got a really great idea. And the minute they've got another choice, man, they are out of there.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:26:50):
And so a lot of this connects to this broad piece of advice you always give people is just and focus on vulnerability. You spend a lot of time teaching people just the power vulnerability, which is not intuitive. A lot of people try to move away from showing vulnerability. There's this quote I saw somewhere that "A willingness to be vulnerable makes you not less influential as a leader." Can you just talk about why that is?

Carole Robin (00:27:15):
Yeah, you asked me whether or not I held any contrarian views and I said, yeah, that's one of them. I actually think that a leader who is willing to be appropriately vulnerable is a stronger leader. And so I'll give you this short example of what happened to me because it encompasses a lot of what we've been talking about. So in 1975, I went to work for the largest industrial automation company in the world as the first woman in a non-clerical job. I was a sales engineer, and yes, I am old, but the dinosaurs were not roaming the earth. And the first thing I learned was you leave feelings in the parking lot, whatever you do, you never talk about your feelings or express feelings in the workplace. It's unprofessional. I was like, okay. I got pretty good at it. In fact, I got very good at it.

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Ironic, given that I eventually became known as the queen of putty-feely at Stanford. But at the time, I got very good at it. I'm not a career academic. I've had six different careers. And 10 years later I'm at an off-site and I've been promoted many times, I'm now running a $50 million region. I've got a half a dozen guys that work for me. And yes, ladies, if you're listening, I did finally fix that, but at that point, I still hadn't quite fixed it. And we're sitting there and I had an idea, it doesn't matter what it was, but I got a little excited about it and I got crickets and I got a little more excited and I got crickets. I was like, "Come on you guys, this could be really cool. Why can't you see how cool this could be?" And one of my guys leans in, looks at me and says, "Carole, is that like water in the corner of your eye? Oh my God, are you going to cry?" And then he says, "Are you human after all?"

(00:29:09):
Are you human after all? And then I burst out crying and I tore up our agenda and I said, "You don't think I'm human?" I don't think there is anything more important for us to spend our off-site talking about than that. And we spent the next two days talking about who we were, why we were there, what we wanted, what was important to us, how we could help each other. To this day, I believe that was the day I became a leader. To this day I know for a fact any of them would follow me anywhere.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:29:40):
To help people build this muscle and start to practice this to try 15% disclosure, try to be a little more vulnerable. Is there any other examples or just tidbits you can share of like, here's something you should start doing more and more?

Carole Robin (00:29:54):
Let's start with you can start admitting mistakes, especially when everybody knows you made one, you actually lose a lot more credibility by ignoring it. And you can start again 15% by experimenting with sharing what's going on for you, particularly with regard to feelings a little bit more often. So there's a recent course is called Touchy-Feely emphasis on the feely and not the touchy. And that's because so much of our ability to develop this competence comes down to the appropriate use of feelings. That's why a vocabulary of feelings, how sad is it? We had to develop a vocabulary feelings because that's how hard it is for people to even access what they're feeling. So there's a vocabulary feelings in the syllabus, in the course, in the appendix of the book. Every member, every person who ever goes through a leaders in tech program gets it. And it starts with allowing yourself to be known, not just in terms of facts and... Feelings give meaning to facts.

(00:31:12):
Let me give you another example. If I tell you I went ziplining, well, that's interesting. Maybe you learned something about me. Maybe you start to make up all sorts of interesting stories about me. But if I tell you I went ziplining and I was terrified, but I went because I felt coerced by my family and I didn't want to be left alone back and then miss out. Well, you learned a lot more about me, didn't you? One of my most satisfying moments at the very first Leaders in Tech retreat we ever did was of a former student of mine who had taken Touchy Feely 15 years before, and who said, based on everything I learned 15 years ago from Carole, I couldn't imagine what I would learn if I came back. So I'm back. And he said, but Carole or no Carole, I will not sit around for four days talking about how we're all crushing it. I will leave.

(00:32:15):
I was like, "Oh," I was so proud. And now there are times when a leader does have to stand up and say, yeah, we're crushing it. So another really, really important thing that people don't understand is that all of this is very nuanced and very context dependent, and most people unanswered Tell me what to do when X happens. Well, did X happen with this person or this person? What relationship do you have with them in the first place? Are there 20 people in the room of 250? Is this being recorded? There's just so many different things. Who's going to have access to it? There's so many things that you have to consider, and especially today, I know I'm old and this will sound predictable, but I am not a social media fan. I think it has done more to destroy strong relationships and to destroy people's ability to even learn or think about what it takes to have a great relationship.

(00:33:26):
Anyway, we could do a whole podcast on that. I have a former Leaders in Tech fellow who sent me this fantastic, here's another great example, sent me an email and maybe he called me, I don't remember. It doesn't matter. He said, "So I had my all-hands meetings are every Monday morning, on Friday, I found out we had missed a major deadline on a product release, and I spent the entire weekend just furious, pissed off, wanting to fire a lot of them," and he said, "And then on Sunday afternoon, I remembered part of what you taught us was that anger is often a secondary emotion and often under anger is either fear or hurt. And then I realized, oh yeah, I'm actually feeling pretty scared here, that nobody is as worried about this as I am."

(00:34:24):
And so he said, "So on Monday morning, instead of getting up and blasting them all as I was prepared to do, I got up and I said, so, gang, I am deeply worried and afraid that I'm the only person here who is as concerned about this missed deadline as I am and what it's going to mean to our customers." And he said, "I have never had my troops rally to fix something faster." So appropriate use of feelings is something most people don't know how to do. They don't even know how to access the feeling. I told this particular anecdote about anger being a secondary emotion at a very big workshop a number of months ago, and a woman walked up to me and said, "Wow, thank you so much. I've never understood that my husband Carries so much fear and so much hurt because he only ever leads with anger. It never even occurred to me something else might be going on." And anger is a distancing emotion, whereas hurt, fear, sadness, loneliness, happiness, joy are all connecting emotions. So those are kinds of things people learn when they come through our programs.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:35:47):
Oh, man, you're blowing my mind already. I can see why marriages are saved by a lot of these things you teach. That's a really profound point you're just making there that anger is a secondary emotion. Really what's going on is you're afraid or you're hurt. Is there anything more you can add there because this feels very important?

Carole Robin (00:36:06):
That is normally what's going on, except we've all been socialized not to be vulnerable, especially in business and naming any of those other things makes us feel vulnerable. So somehow being angry doesn't make us feel vulnerable. That's the okay emotion, as long as you express it in an appropriate way, but it's a distancing emotion. What a disservice to everybody in business. What a disservice to professional learning, to not help people understand that anger is a distancing emotion and that there are other emotions that are appropriate and that are connecting.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:36:46):
This connects so beautifully to your first point we talked about of being vulnerable and disclosing more and how I completely see how if you were just to share, I'm afraid of this, how that brings people closer to you and feels like they will trust you more versus you not sharing that.

Carole Robin (00:37:03):
Right. It connects to something else. You and I talked about one of the biggest gifts I think people get out of taking Touchy Feely or going through the Leaders in Tech program or even reading the book is that they learn that they hold some mental models, some beliefs and assumptions. If I do this, that will happen, or if I don't do this, this will happen. And those are beliefs and assumptions that we develop very early in our careers like I did. Whatever you do, you leave your feelings in the parking lot. And it served me really well initially. If I'd burst out crying two months into the job, I'd have never ended up running a $50 million region and then it over served me, and then it cost me because I never had a reason to update it.

(00:37:56):
Because I never realized I was paying a cost for continuing to hold that belief that drove my behaviors. And mental models, then we developed them very early and they're grooved and we need new experiences in order to even believe that they're maybe subject to testing. Gee, I will forever be grateful to this fellow who said, "Oh my God, are you human after all?" I was like, how did this ever happen that I became seen as not human? Again, we go back to some of the stuff we talked about earlier, which is that leaders, if a leader doesn't show up with a willingness to update their mental models and their beliefs, they're certainly not going to inspire anybody else to do that.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:38:59):
I'm glad you got here because this is exactly where I was going to go next, is this mental model challenge we run into where we develop these mental models early on and then they end up hurting us later in life. Are there common mental models people have that hurt them as they grow? Or is it very particular independent on people's experience?

Carole Robin (00:39:17):
I mean, there are some that are pretty tried and true. I mean, the first one is, if I tell you more about me, you'll take advantage of me. Or if I am vulnerable with you or disclosing, you'll think I'm weak. And inevitably, somebody has had a time in their life where that has been true, and maybe it was true a lot, but then they decide that's the only outcome that's ever possible as opposed to part of growing up and becoming more mature is differentiating and being more discretionary in who we open up to and how we open up to them. It's like I have a colleague who often says, we have to think about these things as dials, not switches. It's not an all or I don't tell you everything or nothing. I don't share every single feeling I've got or none. It's a dial and you move it at 15% rate.

(00:40:22):
Another mental model people hold, and this becomes a huge learning for people who go through our programs, is people think if I give you feedback, it's going to ruin the relationship. It's going to weaken the relationship. Whoa, that's really common. Even though everybody's always wanting, I want more feedback, I want to know how it can be better, but everybody believes that giving feedback is going to create a problem. And that's because most people have in fact been on the receiving end of feedback poorly given or they've given feedback in a not very good way. They've stepped in piles of doodoo, yes. And it does not mean feedback ruins relationships. It means feedback the way you've always seen it done or done. It ruins relationships pretty important. And then one of the things that we arm people with, I think one of the most powerful pieces of learning that people get is learning how to give feedback in a way that is going to build relationships as opposed to, and it's going to build a relationship.

(00:41:29):
If you see that my reason for wanting to give it to you is that I'm invested in you and in us it's similarly, we hold mental models about expressing what we call pinches, which are just those little things that people do. Then we're just like, eh, I'm not going to make a big deal out of it. I'm not going to say anything, but mental model is, eh, it's a small thing. The problem is, if I'm doing something that's mildly irritating and you don't tell me, then what am I going to do?

Lenny Rachitsky (00:42:01):
You're doing it.

Carole Robin (00:42:01):
And then are you going to get less irritated or more irritated?

Lenny Rachitsky (00:42:02):
More irritated.

Carole Robin (00:42:04):
Yeah. Now, if I get less irritated or it doesn't change, then you're right. I shouldn't say anything. But if I have the wherewithal to notice, this is why we talk about two antenna, which I'll come back to notice that I'm getting more and more activated, more and more irritated, then it's really important for me to say something. And by the way, address it while it's still small and then it won't get big. That's why we call it talk about a pinch before it becomes a crunch, and then it becomes a much bigger deal. But most of the time we say it's not worth it. So I always tell students, okay, substitute the pronoun, substitute the word it for I, you, we. I'm not worth it, you're not worth it. We're not worth it. And then ask yourself again whether it's worth raising.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:42:56):
This episode is brought to you by the a16z Podcast. Every week on this podcast, you get to hear from product leaders and growth experts from some of the world's most impactful companies, whether it's Airbnb, Slack, Figma, or Stripe. But what will the next wave of companies look like? One firm might have a clue, and recent Horowitz invested in all four of the companies I just mentioned and their flagship podcast, the a16z Podcast features conversations with the very founders and technologists shaping our future. Recent episodes feature folks like Marc Andreessen, longtime builders like Adam D'Angelo from Quora and Mark Pincus from Zynga, even some voices from the government like the CIA's first-ever chief technology officer, Nand Mulchandani. From drones to DNA to deep learning, you can eavesdrop on the future with the a16z Podcast. I want to talk about how to give feedback well, but I think it might be helpful to talk about this concept that you call the three realities and the net, because I think that sets up a lot of this.

Carole Robin (00:44:00):
Yeah. And in fact, it is fundamental to giving feedback.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:44:03):
Well, awesome.

Carole Robin (00:44:04):
So they're very related. You were right on the money. And you know what, let me just take a moment and talk. I mentioned the two antennae, and this is in the book, but we're all equipped with two antennae. One is tracking what's going on for me, my internal antenna. The other one is trying to pick up signals on what might be going on for you. And first of all, recognizing those two antennae exist. Second of all, learning how to hone our ability to pick up subtler and subtler signals make us more interpersonally competent. That's also why I'm a big believer in meditation and awareness. So, anyway, if we now fast-forward to your question about how to give feedback well, which has to do with understanding the three realities. It starts with in any exchange between two people, there are three realities. There is my intent, how I see the world, my background, my history, there is what I do or say or don't do, verbal or nonverbal.

(00:45:09):
So my reality is reality number one, my behavior, verbal or nonverbal is reality number two. And whatever happens on your end is reality. Number three, the impact of what I've said or done, how you see things, your background. So there's these three distinct realities. And the trouble we get into when we don't recognize that those three realities exist is we don't understand that we are only privy to two out of the three. So I know what's going on for me, and I know what I did. I have no idea what happened on your end. You know what I did and how it impacted you. So your two are... The only one we share is the one in the middle in common, the behaviors right now, we draw a metaphorical net between reality number one and reality number two to help people understand. And anybody who's ever taken Touchy Feely in no matter which context knows the saying, "Stay on your side of the net."

(00:46:28):
Meaning stick with the two realities you know because we get in trouble the minute we start thinking we know the other person's reality. Right? So I've told this anecdote many times, it might even be in the book, but I come home... I'm sorry, my husband comes home after a very long day in the valley. He was an executive. I've got two little kids, infant and a 2-year-old. I've been waiting for him to come home. I come running into the front room. In those days, by the way, we still had newspapers. He's reading the newspaper and I say, "Oh my God. Oh my God, you're home. I can't wait until I tell you what happened tonight. I can't believe what happened. Why are we living in Palo Alto, Jesus Christ? I don't want to raise kids in Palo Alto. It's a terrible town. I wish that new nursery school, it hasn't even opened. It's already closed. Oh my God."

(00:47:18):
And then he says, "mm-hmm, great. "So then I say, you're not listening. And by the way, people have been taught iMessages, I feel that you're not listening is exactly the same thing, it doesn't have a single feeling word in it. I don't know whether he was listening or not. I'm over the net. I'm in his court unless I'm in his head. I don't know whether he was listening or not. But then he says, yeah, I was listening. You're all worked up. You went to that new nursery school. Actually it's more like this. Yeah, you're all worked up and you went to that new nursery school hasn't even opened. You're all worked up. Now I get a little bit more activated and I say, "How can you not care?" First of all, he didn't say, I don't care, did he? I don't know whether he cares or not. And by the way, "How can you be so insensitive?"

(00:48:13):
And I feel that you don't care and I feel you're being insensitive are not feelings. They're attributions and imputed motives, and that's where we make our biggest mistakes when it comes to feedback. And what that does is it makes the other person defensive. So calling my husband insensitive is the most insensitive thing in the world because he's one of the most sensitive people on the planet. So it wasn't until I learned to stay on my side of the net and say, so when I speak and I'm all worked up about something and the only thing I get back from you are either a grunt or an affectless repetition of what I just said, that's reality number two, anybody watching the video would say, that's what happened, I don't feel heard. He can't say, yeah, you do. And when I don't feel heard, I feel hurt and I feel distanced.

(00:49:11):
And the reason I'm telling you that is because I can't be here for you in the way I want to be when I feel that way. So the formula is when you do insert behavior, I feel pull out the vocabulary of feelings and I'm telling you this because, or I'm hoping the outcome of you knowing this is. And so then what happened is he said, "Well, if you want my undivided attention, then you've got to give me some time to unwind when I get home." What a reasonable request. I said, "Well, how much time do you need?" He said, "I don't know, half an hour." "I was like, half an hour?" I've been counting the minutes. How about five minutes? We settled on 15. And by the way, that is the purpose of feedback. When it's constructive feedback, move into a problem-solving conversation, don't change the other person. Move into behaviors that will work better for both of you.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:50:14):
Amazing. And this structure, so the structure you just shared, and this is similar to nonviolent communication structure?

Carole Robin (00:50:14):
Yes.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:50:21):
Okay, cool.

Carole Robin (00:50:21):
It is.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:50:22):
So there's books people can read on this-

Carole Robin (00:50:23):
Right. Ours came before, but that's okay.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:50:26):
Oh, wow. Okay. Good to know.

Carole Robin (00:50:30):
I will say anything that spreads the word and anything that helps people learn how to engage with each other in ways that build relationship, I'm all for.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:50:42):
I love that attitude. Okay, so the structure again is just when you do some behavior, I feel an emotion. By the way, is there a flyer or handout? I think the book has these of just emotions. Okay, cool. And feelings.

Carole Robin (00:50:58):
The vocabulary of feelings is an appendix in the book.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:51:01):
Okay, great.

Carole Robin (00:51:02):
As is the formula.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:51:04):
Amazing. Okay, great. So by the book, if you want to get really good at this stuff, is there anything online we can point people to, or?

Carole Robin (00:51:10):
We got a picture of the... I'll send you a couple of slides.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:51:14):
Perfect.

Carole Robin (00:51:16):
And then you can just say, here are the slides.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:51:17):
Amazing. So we'll link to that in the show notes. And as you talk through all of these lessons and pieces of advice, it makes so much sense why this is something you need to do. Because I imagine what's happening in the class here is you do this with someone and then you hear the reality and it often surprises you. Right?

Carole Robin (00:51:36):
Exactly. Because often we say it takes two to know one, I don't know what impact I'm having on you until you tell me. And I have to be willing to be a little vulnerable to ask. And if we go back to that first activity that you asked me to describe way at the beginning, then we put them back in pairs and we say, okay, now that you've learned a little bit about feedback, tell your partner what they did that made it easier for you to disclose more and be more willing to be more vulnerable and/or what they did that made it a little harder. And right there in the moment, you learned something about yourself that you might never have known. Somebody says, you looked away as I was talking, you might not have even known you did that. You looked at your watch. And I love this.

(00:52:34):
One of my greatest moments when I was teaching was that I asked a question. I was teaching in a big lecture hall at the law school, and they didn't have any clocks on the wall. And I asked a question and a student began answering, and I just glanced at my watch just because I was trying to figure out where I was in terms of when I had to wrap up. And he walked up to me after class and he said, "Professor, I felt disrespected when you looked at your watch while I was answering," I hugged him. Well, first I asked him if it was okay, "Is it okay if I hug you?" And then I hugged him.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:53:12):
And I love how so much of this is like, we never get this feedback in real life. No one ever tells us this thing you did is distracting them, annoying them, making them feel like they're not being heard.

Carole Robin (00:53:22):
And then guess what? Then he leaves and then somebody says, how was that? He says, oh, she's really disrespectful. And then pretty soon nobody's ever even been there. But my reputation is that I don't respect students. That's how stuff gets out of control.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:53:36):
Yeah. And you wish people would tell you, right? Everybody wants this, but it's so hard and uncomfortable to tell anyone negative feedback.

Carole Robin (00:53:45):
Which by the way, I never used the word negative when it comes to feedback.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:53:48):
Okay. Okay.

Carole Robin (00:53:50):
So feedback is either constructive or complimentary. Constructive feedback is there's something you're doing that is problematic, and the purpose of it is let's move to a problem solving conversation like with Andy and me. The purpose of complimentary feedback is, wow, that's the third time you've handed in that report early and completely, and you even went above and beyond and did this and this. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that, how lucky I feel that you work for me. And if I'm telling you this, because if there's ever something that you want that we're not giving you, I want to make sure you know that I want to talk about it. By the way, same formula. Now compare that to nice job, thanks, right? All feedback is data. So all feedback is positive. More data is always better than less data.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:54:46):
I agree. That's a great lesson there. To maybe make this even more practical for listeners that are maybe working on a product and say they have to give feedback in a product design or to a colleague who did something wrong. Is there an example that you could share of just in the workplace.

Carole Robin (00:55:03):
I'm glad you asked that, because first of all, we're not talking about performance feedback and we're not necessarily talking about feedback on a task. What we're talking about is interpersonal feedback. And the reason it's so important is that if you don't take care of that, then that other feedback becomes unresolved. When you leave the interpersonal stuff unresolved, then the other feedback doesn't go well because the real problem is that I'm still pissed off that you never answered my phone call. So now I'm going to make it all about how this feature really is never going to work. Here's an example. Somebody walks into... A manager or a team leader or whatever, walks into a room meeting, starts a meeting by say, so I want to make sure we hear from everybody. I want to make sure that we have a very full conversation.

(00:55:58):
I want to talk about X. And now let's say that I start to say something and before I have finished, he says, yeah, and the other thing we should talk about is blah, blah. And then a little later a similar thing happens. I start to suggest that there's another way to look at this and he turns back to somebody else, what somebody else had said and never says anything in response to what I just said. And I'm being very specific here, very behaviorally specific. And then after a while, what happens to me is I feel less and less inclined to offer up anything. Now, maybe he doesn't care, but if he cares because he started by think he wanted to hear from everybody, then I'm not being very caring if I don't tell him what the impact was of his behavior. So I don't call him out in the middle of the meeting because I don't want to embarrass him, but I might go to his office later and say, "So, John, do you have a few minutes?" I have an observation.

(00:57:07):
I've got something that I experienced that you might want to know. "Sure, Carole." So when I started to say x, you did y. When I started to say z, you did it. I said, and when that you started the meeting by saying you want to hear from everybody. When that happened, I felt less and less... I felt shut down, and I felt less and less inclined to offer up my opinion. Maybe that's okay, but I wondered whether you knew that that was the impact. And I'm telling you, because as far as I am concerned, in that meeting, you did not accomplish your stated desire. Your desired outcome was to hear from everybody. And after a while, I just gave up trying to give you my...

Lenny Rachitsky (00:57:52):
Well, it's like you need to solve these pinches as you described early, because all of this comes back to these are relationships, they matter because that's the way we get everything done. And if you just ignore these things, your relationship's going to be hurt. You're not going to be able to accomplish the things you want to accomplish. It's almost like something you need to do even though it feels hard.

Carole Robin (00:58:14):
Absolutely. And that's why I say that feedback builds relationships because by the way, if I'm doing something that I'm, I wish I hadn't done, it's not that I'm going to be like, "Oh yeah, I'm so glad I did that." But if I recognize that it would've been easier for you not to say anything because it would've been more comfortable, but because you cared about me, you actually said something to me, that talk about something that builds relationship.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:58:45):
Coming back to the antenna as you described feels like one of the most important skills you teach people is to build this antenna both of yourself, which is you could to think is easier, but maybe often not, but also understanding how the other person feels. And you have this concept of the art of inquiry and how powerful that is. Can you just talk about what that is?

Carole Robin (00:59:06):
Oh, yeah. I'm glad you brought that up, because inquiry is a fundamental component of strong interpersonal relationships for a couple of reasons. And first of all, let's stop and note, inquiry comes the root of the word inquiry is quest. Quest means to be in search of and not knowing what you're going to find, not the way most people think about questions and inquiries. Most of the time people ask a question to confirm a hypothesis. "Don't you think you're just trying to discredit John by doing that?" That's not inquiry. "Don't you think you'd just be better off letting that go?" That's not inquiry. And by the way, another thing to note in artful inquiry, first of all, you have to suspend judgment. You cannot be curious if you've already decided you know what's going on someone else. You can always go back to being judgmental, but you got to suspend it long enough to see if there's something for you to learn.

(01:00:12):
And then the way you ask the question matters, questions that can be answered with yes or no are typically limiting questions and aren't going to be very productive. Questions that start with why, why did you do that? Are going to make me defensive? Or worse, why are you crying? Well, is that going to make me want to tell you more about why I am upset or why are you upset? Right away I'm going to go into, "Oh no, I'm not upset. It's not a big deal." Or I'm going to go into a place that's not necessarily very productive because this reminds me of how my mother always scolded me. Neither one is going to be very productive. So questions that start with what? What's this about? What's going on? Where is this manifesting? When did you see this happen last? How might we go about unpacking what's going on? Where is this happening most? When, where, how, stay away from why. And it's a whole art.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:01:14):
Something else you teach people and you're big on is that people can actually change themselves. I think a lot of people might feel like, I'm just not good at this. I'm not good at giving feedback. I'm not good at maybe asking questions. I'm just like, I don't know. Talk about what you found about the change people see and why it's actually possible and how.

Carole Robin (01:01:35):
Well, for starters, to any of your listeners, one of my very favorite authors is Carol Dweck who wrote a book called Mindset and you put a word yet at the end of any of those, I don't know how yet, I'm not like that yet, changes the meaning of the whole thing. And by the way, talk about updating a mental model, instant update of a mental model. And the other thing that I'll say is we are all capable of changing our behavior. We cannot change our personality. We are born wired with personalities. I am very outgoing and extroverted as might come as a shock to all of you. And you know what? When I overdo it, I suck all the oxygen out of the room and one of the behaviors I had to learn, and it takes discipline to engage in was zipping it a little more so that others could speak up more.

(01:02:40):
And my incentive was that I actually really wanted to learn more about what was going on for them and I wasn't going to learn anything unless I shut up long enough for them to tell me. So behavior is something we all have control over. Now when I give somebody feedback and they tell me, well, I can't do that. If I've asked them to change a behavior, then I'll say, I'm sorry, I don't think I can accept I can't. I will accept I don't want to or I don't have it, but I don't have to accept I can't. So I'd just like you to own the fact that it's a choice that you're making.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:03:25):
Kind of along those lines, something, I don't know if this is from your book, but I saw somewhere you said that it's possible to say almost anything to almost anyone if you have the necessary skills. How do people build these skills? I know we talked about a lot of this through the structure focusing on your side of the net, but just how do you avoid people getting defensive?

Carole Robin (01:03:43):
First of all, let's make sure that we point out that what we're doing here is we're shifting probabilities of success, we're not guaranteeing anything. And let's say that you do your best and you stay on your side of the net and you give somebody feedback and they go bonkers and they call you all kinds of names and they write... Now there's an opportunity to learn something else that everybody learns in these programs, which is called repair. How do you repair when something goes sideways? Because no matter how good you are, no matter how skilled you get, no matter what your intent was, sometimes it won't work. And then you've got to know how to repair. And that's why, remember I told you that our facilitators have a unique set of skills? And that's because they have to allow messes to happen otherwise nobody's going to learn how to repair. And repair often goes back to some of what we've already talked about. Let's start with I come in the kitchen, my husband's struggling. I say to him, "Can I help you with that?" He says, "Don't tell me what to do."

(01:05:04):
I'm sure none of your listeners can relate to this story. And I say, instead of, "I wasn't trying to tell you what to do, I was just trying to be helpful. What a kind of way to respond to my offering help is that?" I say, "What did you hear me say?" One of the most powerful things you can do when somebody responds in a way that feels very unexpected and out of whack with what you just said is go back to, "What did you hear me say?" Because nine times out of 10 what they heard is not what you said. He said, "I heard you say I didn't know what I was doing." Now, by the way, it didn't matter. That's not what I said. And I didn't say, that's not what I said. I said, "Wow, really glad I asked, because now that I understand that that's what you heard, I understand why you reacted the way you did." And I said, "Let me try it again."

(01:06:04):
One of the ways that I show somebody that I love them is I offer to help and what would you like me to do if in a situation like this when I see you struggling? He says, "Wait for me to ask." And that was 25 years ago, and that has served us very well because we've been married 37 years, 39 years. And if we go back to feedback, you give somebody feedback, they get super defensive. By the way, net jumping invites net jumping, so they're likely to net jump too. And by the way, the minute you label somebody or you're over the net. In fact you sent me something that was really interesting that I wanted to find here because you said "Nobody is born with genes for being rude or self-involved." Well, guess what?

(01:06:56):
Rude and self-involved are labels that is not behaviorally specific. So calling somebody rude or self-involved is just going to make them defensive. But saying, I was interrupted three times, and I'm telling you this because you said you wanted to hear my opinion and I just thought you should know that I was put off by being interrupted, much less likely to incite defensiveness.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:07:34):
Absolutely. Just hearing what actually happened, staying on your side of the net.

Carole Robin (01:07:38):
Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:07:39):
So again, this always comes back to I could see this being so effective doing this in a class versus just listening to us and like, okay, I'm going to start staying in my side of the net and I'm going to prepare relationships. Are there any other examples of exercises you do in the class that might be helpful to people just to hear how you learn some of these things?

Carole Robin (01:07:57):
Every chapter in the book has a section at the end called Deepen Your Learning and those deep in your learning sections, every single one of them has a suggested activity, something you can go do, and some of those come from some of the things we do in the classroom. So that's one place to start in terms of trying to find very tactical and practical ways of applying some of this. The other thing that we often do, I often do in leaders in Tech, I used to do this less at Stanford because they did a lot of this in their T groups and they were actually in real time with each other putting everything they were learning to use. But sometimes with my execs in Leaders in Tech, I will, for example, put them in a trio and I will say to you, so Lenny, I want you to think of somebody who you would like to give feedback to and I want you to tell me what's the behavior they're engaging in?

(01:09:04):
How does it make you feel? What would be behind you wanting to tell them? What would be your desired outcome to the conversation? Then I become you, you become your difficult person because you know them and I don't, and we role play because you've now told me what you need, what you want, what's going on for you, and then you have to play your difficult person as well as you can. The third person's usually the observer who pinch hits and says, "Carole, I think that was over the net." "Carole, I don't think that was a behavior." And by the way, we say, I feel insert feeling, nine times out of 10 people say, I feel that, or I feel like, I feel that you don't care is not a feeling.

(01:09:56):
I feel like it doesn't matter, is not a feeling. I feel that you're not committed is not a feeling. In fact, they're all over the net. You're almost guaranteed to be over the net when you start I feel and put in like or that, guaranteed. Very easy hack. I feel pull up vocabulary feeling, you can't say grammatically correctly. I feel that sad or I feel that angry, or I feel that irritated or I feel like disappointed, doesn't work.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:10:28):
This is amazing marriage advice going to, I need to remember these things.

Carole Robin (01:10:34):
Yeah. Many married couples have bought the book together and read it together actually, which is cool.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:10:41):
There's a few other things I want to touch on that I love. One is a tip that you share. You call it advise hinders relationships.

Carole Robin (01:10:49):
Oh, I'm really glad you asked me about that because two things, a couple of things. First of all, leaders often believe this is another mental model that they have to have all the answers, and that is actually a pretty, it's not a very productive mental model or belief because first of all, puts a huge amount of pressure on the leader. Now suddenly I always have to know and what happens when I don't know. Second of all, I believe a leader's job is to ensure the best answer is found. It doesn't matter whether it comes from me or anywhere else in the organization. It also allows for the possibility that somebody else may have a better answer than me. And a really, really good solution has been squelched and never surfaced because people are afraid to say, well, I see it a little differently. What if we did this?

(01:11:50):
We had a or disaster as a result of that. The other thing about advice is that it creates even bigger power differentials between people. So if you're the leader or you're in the higher power position to start with, then giving me advice is only going to make me feel even lower power as opposed to, well, let's think about this together. Let's be thought partners. Often when we give advice, it's a good thing to stop yourself and ask yourself, "Who am I doing this for? Am I doing this for me so that I can puff myself up with everything I know or am I doing it for you because this is really going to help you and make you better?"

(01:12:34):
Nine times out of 10, being a thought partner as you explore the various options and coming to your own solution is both going to help you develop more, and then you're not going to have to come ask me again if the only time you ever learn is when you come ask me and you don't go through any of the work or figuring out how I got to that answer, well, then I've just made more work for myself.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:13:03):
There's this great Harvard Business Review post I just read about monkeys on your back. Have you heard of this?

Carole Robin (01:13:09):
Yes.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:13:09):
Yeah. Where basically as a manager, people are always trying to put monkeys on your back to have you solve their problem, and your job as a manager is to keep the monkeys on their own backs and help them.

Carole Robin (01:13:19):
Yes, and I'm glad you brought that up because people then have become so used to the quick shortcut is you'll just give me the answer. First of all, you have enabled powerlessness. You certainly haven't helped them learn and grow. If you at all think your job as a manager is to at least sometimes do that, and sometimes people will say, "Can't you just give me the answer?" And then I always just say, I could and here's why I'm not going to because I don't think that'll serve you because that's not my job. My job isn't just to give you the answers. My job is to turn you into somebody who eventually will just know what the right answer is.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:14:03):
But just give me the answer. Does this apply to friendships also? I know often people come to you as a friend, I need some advice on this. Does this apply as well? Often try not to give advice, or is it a different dynamic there?

Carole Robin (01:14:20):
Well, some of the same power differential can happen. I think chapter four in the book is about two guys who were good friends and one of them is always trying to give advice to the other one. First of all, it can be annoying if you didn't ask for it. So I certainly wouldn't give advice unless somebody asked for it, and I might not immediately jump to the advice, I might want to explore. What have you already thought about? How have you already approached it? Where are you stuck? I might ask more questions before I immediately go into advice because by the way, nine times out of 10, you end up giving advice on something that's not really what the person was worried about or wondering about. So first go to inquiry. You can always come back to advice.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:15:21):
I find that every time I try to resist or I make myself resist giving advice and instead ask more questions, every single time, I realized, okay, I had no idea what they were actually looking for or what was going on, but it's hard to do. I'm just like, here, I just want to tell you, here's the thing.

Carole Robin (01:15:39):
Totally. Because you know what? It's another mental model. I serve you best by just giving you advice when you ask for it, that's the loving, caring thing to do. Well, it's a mental model. Try testing it and seeing whether or not it really turns out to still be valid.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:15:58):
And so maybe the more correct mental model is how would you describe it that it's often better to help the person figure it out, or is it that you just often don't actually understand what's going on?

Carole Robin (01:16:09):
The best thing to do first go to inquiry. Because by the way, I also, as you might imagine, I tend to err very much on the side of transparency, and so I'll say, man, I got all kinds of things going on in my head about what I think would be great for you to do, and I'm going to resist that because I, first of all may or may not hit the mark, so I'd really like to understand more. And second of all, I wonder if in the end be even more fruitful if we explore different things together.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:16:46):
Just a few more questions. One is, so we have this segment on the podcast that I call Failure Corner, where people share failure in their career and what they learn from it, and you have a really constructive way of thinking about failure with this great acronym. Can you talk about that?

Carole Robin (01:17:02):
The acronym is A-F-O-G, another F-ing... I don't know your audience well enough. Don't want to offend anybody.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:17:11):
Go for it. If you feel like-

Carole Robin (01:17:12):
Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth. Every student who ever took a class from me, every client who I have ever coached, every participant who's ever gone through Leaders in Tech knows that acronym because my question, when something has gone wrong or a person has experienced a failure, my first question is always, so what did you learn? Because there's always a lesson, and then usually what follows is, yeah, you just had an AFOG. And as a person who's had a lot of AFOGs throughout my life, it puts it in perspective. I like the perspective that it offers, so it's not the end of the world. Sometimes AFOGs are more painful than others. Some AFOGs take longer to recover from than others. Most of the time they're recoverable, particularly if I've invested the energy in really unpacking what there was for me to be to learn.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:18:27):
Yeah. So the advice here is when something goes wrong, when you fail, think of it as another fucking opportunity for growth, AFOG.

Carole Robin (01:18:27):
Exactly.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:18:27):
Okay.

Carole Robin (01:18:35):
That's exactly right.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:18:37):
To even go full circle to where we started building exceptional relationships, building robust relationships. In the book, you have this checklist of just how to build an exceptional relationship. I know you don't have all this in your head, whatever.

Carole Robin (01:18:49):
Actually I probably do.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:18:50):
You probably do. What's on this list of just things you can do to build exceptional relationships?

Carole Robin (01:18:57):
Well, you can go back to the fact that there are six characteristics of exceptional relationships, and actually those are the characteristics that are present as a relationship is moving down this continuum that we've talked about. And the more each of these exists, the farther down the continuum you are. So the first one is I'm better known by you, and of course there's skills involved in how do I allow myself to be known. The second one is, I know you better and there's skills involved in getting to know you better. We've talked about many of them. The third one is we trust that our disclosures won't be used against us. The fourth one is we can be honest with each other. That's where all the feedback comes in. The fifth one is we know how to resolve conflict productively, and the sixth one is we are committed to each other's learning and growth. And when all six of those are present to varying degrees, you've moved farther down the continuum.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:00):
You wrote somewhere that you know your relationship has become exceptional when you and the other person don't have to hide important parts of yourself and can deal with major issues even if it feels scary.

Carole Robin (01:20:10):
Yep. I did write that somewhere and I stand by that.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:15):
If you zoom out from all of your work and teachings, are there any overarching themes that continue to come up that you think are important for people to take away from this conversation?

Carole Robin (01:20:28):
Well, for starters, we're all works in progress, which means every relationship in your life is a work in progress. Because if I'm a work in progress and you're a work in progress, then by default so is our relationship. And so remembering that what worked with you two years ago may or may not work for you now because we're different people. So I think that's a biggie. I think stopping and becoming aware of what are the mental models that are driving these choices that I'm making, every behavior has in front of it a choice. If we stop long enough to become aware of it and in front of every choice, there's some belief. So I try to march myself back from the result to the behavior, to the choice, to the mental model that drove it or the skill or lack of skill.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:21:36):
Something that we didn't talk about at the beginning of this because it might distract people, but you've been dealing with Long COVID for almost two years at this point. Where are you at with it? How are things going and is there anything you've learned from this unexpected part of your life?

Carole Robin (01:21:54):
It's given me an opportunity to live a lot of what I teach. So I always taught in my leadership classes that the worst thing a leader can do is make an organization too dependent on them. If you care about building a sustainable long-term organization and a legacy, then it behooves you not to make the organization very dependent on you. So over the last 20 months, I have slowly and surely given more and more of my responsibilities to more and more members of the team to the point where hot off the press, I'm about to become only an advisor and step out of really all of my operational duties probably by the end of this year. Now, there was a point at which I was like, and oh my God, what happens if I get better suddenly? Because people do get better, and one of my very wise children said, "Mom, I'm pretty sure that if you suddenly get a lot better, they'll be happy to give you lots of stuff to do." So, anyway, that's one of probably the biggest lessons, and also it goes with a lesson around acceptance and accept.

(01:23:25):
I wrote a LinkedIn, I think a LinkedIn, not a blog paper, one of those LinkedIn things. If you go to my website, you can look at things I've written, I think it was called Long COVID and Acceptance or something like that. But it's about how acceptance is not resignation, and it's about having an opportunity to rethink a lot of things and reframe beliefs. And I think the last thing I'll say about it is that it has made me a much more empathetic person, and I think one of the really interesting and important things to learn and have always continued to learn in doing the interpersonal dynamics work we do is you never know what's going on for someone else.

(01:24:26):
And one of the worst things we can do is assume we know what's going on for someone else, and it's really easy to get really... I think I said this before we even got online, which is in the absence of data, people make shit up. So if you don't want people to make shit up about you, you're better off disclosing more because then you'll have more control over your self-definition, not less. People like to make sense of things. They will connect dots however way they want to unless you help them connect them the way you want them to. Another case for self-disclosure.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:25:04):
Well, Carole, I'm incredibly thankful that you made time for this. I know it's not the easiest thing to do these things.

Carole Robin (01:25:10):
Thank you.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:25:11):
To remind people where to find Leaders in Tech and how to apply, tell them the website and who it's for specifically, so the right people go there. And then finally, just how can listeners be useful to you as a final question?

Carole Robin (01:25:23):
I'm on LinkedIn. You won't be able to just connect with me. I've got one of those things where you can't just connect. You need my email address so you can put my email address in the notes. Anybody's more than welcome... But if you connect with me, please don't try to sell me anything. The only reason it's set up that way is that too many people were trying to sell me too many things and I got exasperated. That's the only reason they wanted to connect. So I'm just going to trust that you'll reach out to me because you want to connect with me because you're interested in my work and that you'll also know and be sensitive to the fact that I have Long COVID. So my capacity to respond to messages and emails is definitely impacted. I used to be one of those you could count on me to always respond. By the way, another learning. It turns out everybody didn't write me off just because I couldn't respond to them right away.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:26:14):
That is a really great learning. Okay. And then the website for people that may want to apply and the applications are still open basically by the time this is leadersintech.org?

Carole Robin (01:26:23):
Right.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:26:24):
Amazing. Carole, you are wonderful. Thank you so much for making time for this. Thank you for being here.

Carole Robin (01:26:32):
Thank you.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:26:33):
Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.