How to effectively deal with Negative Stakeholder Feedback

0:00 [Music] let's say your manager said oh yeah it seems like legal doesn't enjoy working with you that's the feedback and so before you go talk to Legal you first need to figure out like hey what's going on what did I do what am I doing right now that may be causing this and maybe use your manager's help for that as well but you really need to understand sort of your version of the problem now why do I say this I say this because I have

0:29 managed many people for many years basically when something like this happened their immediate reaction was yeah because legal is a show and they have all these problems and blah blah and this person is incompetent and we get mixed signals incentives are misaligned when you are in that space and then these people will go talk to this person in that space it's not going to be a productive conversation cuz you know PMS we are sharp and we can argue

0:54 really well most of us by the way this is why some functions don't like us because we are aggressive even if you're not overtly aggressive you're more aggressive than most other functions perhaps with the exception of Engineering in most places PM is viewed as a fairly aggressive function so what happens when we don't do that self- inquiry and we just say ah there's some something wrong in with the system I accept the feedback but the feedback

1:19 exists because there's something wrong with the system and you have that conversation with your legal counterpart it's not going to work cuz the legal counterpart is not going to feel heard it's going to be an analytical conversation but the the next performance review it's going to be the same thing this is why this step is really important you need to own some of this you can't just say oh it's everybody else I'm just fine but I just

1:38 got caught in this unfortunate web of the system that's the first step so assume you've done this step sincerely maybe there are a couple of points that come to mind which is oh yeah in that instance when we were trying to get that thing I was quite pushy about the whole thing and instead of having a conversation with my legal counterpart because we were in a rush I immediately escalated to the VP and that made the

2:00 legal counterpart feel bad I should have first talked to them I should have at least given them the heads up on the escalation because they were blindsided by It Whatever It Is Right these things happen I've seen these things happen many times so figure out what was it and then approach them and then say look I really am looking to improve my relationship and how I work with legal and you are my legal counterpart so therefore however good our relationship

2:24 may be right now I want to make it better so that way you avoid the no everything is fine some people don't want to deal with conflict so they might just say oh no it's okay even though they wrote a bad review for you in person they might just say it's okay so say even if we have a good relationship I want to make it better and I was just thinking about some instances where perhaps I have not stayed true to my

2:42 aspiration of forging a really good relationship and share that example start with that and then see what they say give them something concrete own up to whatever it is that you may have done suboptimally that's the way to go about it I'll repeat these conversations are not difficult if you can find the right words usually we struggle for the right words and so then we avoid the conversation and then we only end up hurting ourselves in the end I'm not

3:09 saying finding the right words is easy but if you think hard enough you will come up with the right words at some point those words will become second nature for instance I get calls all the time from Founders who are trying to have a hard conversation with somebody on their team I'll ask a few questions once I ask them a few questions I can give them within a few seconds okay this is approximately what I would say I

3:28 actually give them words because a lot of this is about communication last thing I'll say is one thing I found very useful when trying to do these conversations is to go to a coach so at stripe there was a office hour style executive coach and you could just sign up on her calendar anytime I had a difficult conversation I would go to her and her name is Lucy and I would ask Lucy I have this situation what should I

3:51 say and Lucy did the whole coach thing she asked questions and what do you think and all the coach stuff and then at some point I would say okay so I'm now aligned what I need to do can you share with me how you might say it and then Lucy would say whatever she said for 30 seconds or a minute and I would go wow that is amazing I would have not thought of framing it this way I would

4:12 note it down and I did it often enough with Lucy that I actually got very good at it as well I was not good at this I was actually quite terrible at this but having done it often enough and seen her do it one it instilled the confidence that oh actually it can be done there is a drastically different way to message in this situation and then you start seeing patterns so now I coach others on

4:35 this even though I wasn't very good at it so I hope that helps [Music]