👂🏻 Don’t listen to everyone, reveal your skeletons, ...
I listen to 10 hours of podcasts a week, so you don’t have to.
This is the 45th edition of Best 3 Podcasts of the Week 🥉🥈🥇, featuring Marketing Against The Grain, My First Million, and In Depth.
What you need to know
‼️ Avoiding hard decisions
🩻 Reveal your skeletons
👂🏻 Don’t listen to everyone
BONUS segment
🏆 Your number one team
‼️ Avoiding hard decisions
🥉 Third place (4 min read vs 32 mins listening)
Who likes feeling awkward and uncomfortable? None of us enjoy it. Warning people. Firing people. Giving people hard truths. They’re a necessary evil. Having hard conversations is crucial to running a healthy business. Join Kieran and Kipp as they dive into the importance of accountability and ownership.
What they say
Have the hard conversations
The need for radical reorganization often comes from people not wanting to do the hard interpersonal work.
This can be giving people hard feedback that they're not good at their job or giving somebody feedback that the job has outgrown them.
Most early stage companies have this problem. The founder has an exec on their team that isn't good enough but won't do anything about it even though they know they should make a change.
One piece of advice I would give everybody is to think about your team, the work you need to do, and the gaps between them.
Be really honest with your team about those gaps and how you want to fill those gaps and skills.
Kipp Bodnar
Get rid of deadwood
Most of the things we talk about is on bad hiring because that's the killer. The more senior a person is the more painful it's going to be. It's a nightmare to unwind. Hiring right is the most important thing.
But we don't talk a lot about something that's quite similar which is companies outgrow people and people outgrow companies.
You'll see a ton of people in a company that have been there too long. The company has outgrown them but they're still there.
That's really bad because they set a cadence for your company that even the best people will start to revert to.
You come in with fresh ideas and you're ready to go but there's this crew and they're on this different rhythm. They don't get pulled up to you. You get pulled down to them.
Kieran Flanagan
Call out the BS
If you’re in an organization where you're seeing these things happen, name the problems.
The best way to name a problem is to write a memo. It's a very powerful exercise because it forces you to be really honest with yourself.
I write what the problems are and under each of them - this is the really hard part - I write where I messed up and how I contributed to this problem.
I made this bad decision or I lost sight of this. You're admitting it to yourself in a way that is deeply meaningful and will transform your ability to talk about those problems with everybody else which is super important.
Kipp Bodnar
What I say
Why it matters: The key to all of this is intellectual honesty. Accepting when you’re wrong. Owning it. Then doing something about it. I like to use a framework I call Double A. It stands for Acknowledgement and Action. Its a simple 2X2 grid that you can use to own and address your mistakes:
In one column I write what went wrong and why. In the other, I write two possible solutions to fix the issue.
Between the lines: Most people have the self awareness to acknowledge their mistakes. The crucial part - the part where most people fall down - is making the hard decisions to make amends.
People fear what might happen or what others might think. By taking action, you’re shining a light on the issue. However, this gives you the chance to rewrite the narrative and come out of the other side even stronger.
Unfortunately, a business doesn’t succeed if only one person takes ownership. You need to breed a culture of accountability and action. Walk the walk, embody the right behaviors, and codify your values. This is the only way to get others to follow.
🩻 Reveal your skeletons
🥈 Second place (4 min read vs 1 hour 23 mins listening)
Your gut is always right. Wrong! Entrepreneurs get emotionally invested in their business. And rightly so. Without passion or drive, you’d never get it off the ground. But it’s important to sense check your instincts, particularly when decisions are wrapped up in emotion.
Shaan welcomed Suli Ali back to the pod to discuss his biggest lessons when selling his business. One of them stood out the most. And its counter intuitive to what most of us might think…
What they say
Be upfront
I learned a big lesson when I was trying to sell TinyCo. I talked to a bunch of acquirers and we got pretty far along with one. Then the deal didn't happen.
There was a bunch of stuff I was trying to keep close to my chest. I was like 'People won’t want to hear this.'
Then a year later we went and sold the company successfully. What helped was a banker named Dick. He was like 'No, actually this isn't a big deal. Just tell these guys. They're not going to care about that.'
He made me comfortable telling things I thought I needed to take to the grave with me. Things I thought were secrets.
Suli Ali
Build trust
Sam did something for me when I was selling the Milk Road. I was like 'Yo, have you got any tips or advice you've had from selling to HubSpot?'
On the same note he goes 'Tell them upfront all the shitty things about your business that might scare them away because guess what... they're going find out during due diligence.'
He's like 'You're going to be 4 weeks in and emotionally invested. It's going to get ugly. They're going to feel like they just found some big wart on the deal. Just tell them here's all the reasons you shouldn't buy this company. If these bother you, you now know and you can decide if that's a deal breaker.'
I took his advice. Later, after the Milk Road deal was closed, we did a debrief and they gave me feedback. They were like 'You know you said something like here's all the ugly parts of our business and we could talk them through?'
They go 'That built so much trust because we didn't know you very well and immediately we felt at ease. We felt like we could trust you guys.'
That turned out to be a big win and that's the exact opposite of my entrepreneur's instinct.
What you want to do is find out as quickly as possible if there's a real match here or not and use that as a tool to build trust versus to build distrust by not disclosing it up front.
Shaan Puri
What I say
Why it matters: Open and direct communication is essential to building strong, trusting relationships. Whether it be with prospective acquirers, partners, employees, or your customers, transparency allows people to be honest about their goals, which helps you to find common ground to get deals done.
Between the lines: Radical transparency is a management philosophy that emphasizes complete openness and honesty in all aspects of a business. Startups like Buffer epitomize this by revealing all of their financial and operational metrics.
This approach is based on the idea that the more information that is shared, the more trust and collaboration can be built with stakeholders. For what it’s worth, the idea is great. In theory.
Personally, I would never run my business this way. There are diminishing returns the more you share. It’s best to open source your culture, hiring or company rituals. In most cases, that’s enough to build the trust you need. Everything else? Don’t share publicly. The risks outweigh the rewards.
👂🏻 Don’t listen to everyone
🥇 First place (5 min read vs 1 hour 5 mins listening)
What truly matters? How do you distinguish between minor issues and major problems that require immediate attention? Anna Binder, Head of People at Asana, discussed this along with Darwinian management and the habits behind a healthy, high-functioning executive team.
What they say
Darwinian management
Not all feedback is created equal.
There are people in your organization who are highly engaged and have high impact. There are people that have low engagement and low impact.
It’s people in the green versus people in the red. The data shows don’t listen to the people in the red because you’ve already lost them. You’re not going to impact them.
If my low impact people don’t feel like they have career growth opportunities at the company, that’s ok. Let’s not react to that.
I really try to think about who are the voices of the people who are highly engaged and high impact and how can I take their input and allow it to shape my roadmap and prioritization.
Anna Binder
What I say
Why it matters: Average employees detract value. By definition, their output is satisfactory at best. They’re not trusted to touch mission critical work. And to top it off, they require extensive management overhead and often make the loudest complaints. So, why keep them?
This underpins the philosophy of Darwinian management. It’s a management style that focuses on survival of the fittest. It prioritizes the needs and concerns of high-performing employees, while dismissing the feedback of low-performing employees.
Between the lines: Let’s steelman this for a second. When taken to the extreme, Darwinian management can lead to:
A lack of empathy and concern for employees who are struggling
A culture of fear and competition rather than collaboration and teamwork
A lack of loyalty among employees who may feel they are disposable
A lack of trust as employees may feel they are being judged unfairly
Underinvestment in employee development and training
High turnover rates as underperforming employees leave or are let go
Shit. That list was longer than expected. But like anything, moderation is key. Personally, I think the principles of Darwinian management stand true. Businesses aren’t governments. They can’t rule by democracy. They can’t pay everyone equally. Nor should they listen to all feedback equally. The point is to take some feedback with a grain of salt. Hear people’s gripes but don’t always act on it. There are often far more pressing and impactful issues to focus your time on.
BONUS segment
🏆 Your number one team
I really believe if you’re an executive your first team is the executive team.
In order for the company to be successful, you need your executive team to be successful.
Your company is going to have highs and lows. We’re amazing some moments and it’s over other moments.
In order to weather those storms, you need to have high levels of trust among the executives in that team.
There’s a lot of ways to build that trust. Accountability. Reliability. Performing. But you can also build that trust by letting people in a little bit.
By saying ‘I’m scared about this thing’ or a moment of vulnerability helps build trust in a way that will serve you so well down the road when things are hard.
The second thing that it does is it supports real talk. If one of my colleagues on company planning sees me making a bad choice or having a blind spot on something, those are the people that I want to point it out to me and speak up.
It’s a lot easier to hear constructive criticism from someone you deeply trust and has let you into their dark moments and vulnerable spots.
Anna Binder
Executives set the tone for the entire organization. A transparent and cohesive executive team paves the way for open communication and collaboration among all teams, resulting in better decision making and improved overall performance.
If your executives prioritize the success of the entire company, rather than just individual departments, you’ll witness this being mirrored by others. You’ll see a ripple effect of cross-functional collaboration and a broader perspective within your business.
Shoutouts
When I find newsletters, podcasts, or books worth sharing, I’ll feature them here:
Let’s end the week this thought provoking tweet:
Skip to 2025. You look back and reflect on January 2023 (today). What do you wish you started doing consistently?Mine? I’ll be boring and say going for a weekly run (given that I’ve failed at that the last 5 years). What’s yours?
Oh, and you may geek out on this like I did:
Note, these quotes were pulled at different points of the episode. Some sentences were left out to make the narrative clearer and more concise. Podup is not associated or affiliated with any podcast (unless otherwise stated). All roundups are independently written and do not imply any sponsorship or endorsement by the podcast.
Love the discussion about honesty upfront in a deal to build trust. Oh, and I too geeked out about the Spider-Man AI. Too cool...