Feedback is a Gift

You have more than 30 years of business experience must have started when you were like eight or nine or something like that can you give us some examples that you've seen of poor leadership?

Yeah, I mean one of the things that I find when I look at my own challenges and where I have you know missteps and they come into a couple buckets an example that actually just recently had a scenario which was around someone in my team we do a lot of feedback we say you know DocuSign feedback as a gift was that I was using what we call and I've now named the faux Socratic method and you know the Socratic method is I'm asking questions to really understand something and solve a problem and then when you get faux on it is you're just asking leading questions so I already have the decision in my mind yeah I know I want to do and I'm gonna keep talking and talking to you about it until you come you're not looking back exactly I'm not looking for the answer from you I'm trying to tell you the answer but I'm doing it in a questioning way.

A good example a second one that we just had a discussion last week with my E staff was around a need for consensus I am actually a person who doesn't like conflict I like trying to come to consensus and maybe cuz my kids went to Quaker school so they had that you know focus on always coming to consensus but it's just naturally my personality sometimes you need to have conflict sometimes part of finding the right answer for organization is being able to kind of go at it and push hard and intellectual debate has always been interesting for me but when there gets to be sort of little bit of that frustration a little bit of that heat builds up I tend to look for compromise and consensus and we had a great discussion about this is like don't let us go let us let us let's you know keep probing and finding the right answer so those are examples I think as a leader you can make a mistake you feel you're doing the right thing but you're not and so you the biggest watchword is always make sure you have people around you they can see your own challenges and foibles and point them out to you and if you don't have people around you you know that are comfortable doing it you don't create that trust you're gonna be in a much less well positioned place.

Going back to what you just said earlier about conflict how it's good to have conflict sometimes but as you've also pointed out some so you can go too far so what's a good way to handle that type of situation?

Well, I think it depends what nature of the conflict is if you have personality challenges um a lot of times we always say hey you two have to figure this out right we want you to figure it out I'm not gonna sort of you know be mom and dad here you got to figure it out but sometimes I think you realize you just you don't have the chemistry and you have to either realign or redesign an organization that hasn't been my experience very often in general I think it really is about taking a step back and saying let's get realigned on our values and get realigned on our goals what are we trying to achieve together if you can get people to say we want to be a you know productive team and we want to be clear about the goals we're trying to achieve I think the personality side by and large can work themselves out.