The Downside
I still remember my first performance review from my time at Etsy. It was the first real review I’d ever gotten in my career (startups before that didn’t have much of a process, and my manager changed suddenly for my one review at Amazon, so the resulting review was… light), and I was pretty nervous not knowing what to expect. As many reviews do, it started out with what had been going well. Randy, my manager, told me that people I worked with really appreciated how straightforward I was, and how they never had to worry about me playing games or wonder if I was sharing what I really thought. It made working with me easier, and people could trust that what I said was how I really felt.
Great, right? It felt good to be recognized for being a straight-shooter, as I’d had bad experiences with people politicking and had tried hard not to be that person.
But
But sometimes, people feel like you sharing your opinion can derail projects or conversations. One person said that they even sometimes leave you out of meetings because they want it to be productive. You should work on deciding when to weigh in and when it’s ok to let things happen.
I can still remember the confusion I felt the rest of that week. How could people really value knowing what I think, but also say they didn’t want to know what I think? If I just let things go, wasn’t that a violation of my desire to be straightforward? The two pieces of feedback were so closely related that I had trouble resolving them in my mind. They seemed completely at odds.
Of course, they weren’t at odds. I learned that, as I’ve written about previously, decisions about products or teams or organizations fall across a spectrum of importance. I had to learn how to mitigate my propensity to treat every conversation as the most important one I was having that day, and really try to understand how important it was to me and what value, if any, my opinions were adding.
That moment also started another lesson for me that has really crystallized over the past few years. Whenever I’ve read over performance reviews for people I’ve managed, I’ve seen, time and again, how people’s strengths are also indicators of the things that hold them back. So often, the things that make us great at our jobs are also the things that wind up in our way when we try to grow and mature in our careers. Maybe you’re great at championing user needs, but have trouble starting projects without always doing research up front. Or maybe you’re a manager who empathizes with their team, but has trouble telling them hard news or letting them know when they’ve messed up. Or perhaps you have great relationships with other departments, but your teams wind up underwater because you say yes to too many requests from those departments.
Over and over, I see people struggle with these kinds of drawbacks. First, it’s hard to come to terms with the fact that the thing you’re successful at is also holding you back. Second, what do you do once you realize that these drawbacks exist? How do you resolve the contradiction without losing what you were good at in the first place? For me, this comes down to two things:
- Acknowledging that you are who you are, and that you may never be great at the things you’re weak at. In my case, it’s going to be my eternal struggle to remember to evaluate situations and temper my response based on how important something really is. I still fail at this and I’ve been actively working on it for years!
- Find ways to hack around your weaknesses. For a long time after that performance review at Etsy, I carried around a business card with, “Don’t panic. Just wait and see what happens,” on it. I also was introduced to the idea of rating my feelings in my mind, which helped a ton (and still does). So, yes, I may never be naturally able to do these things without thinking, but I can improve the situation exponentially by finding ways to basically trick myself into different behaviors.
And this doesn’t just apply to people either. Every company I’ve worked at suffers from the same tension between what they’re great at and what frustrates them. For instance, one of BuzzFeed’s superpowers as a company is how they empower individuals to take risks and try new things. A lot of BuzzFeed’s content success is a direct result of this superpower: you wouldn’t get popular brands like Tasty or great shows like AM2DM or even fun products like The Fondoodler with a top-down approach. The downside, however, is that when anyone can create anything, it makes it difficult for teams that sit in the middle (like BF’s technology, marketing or sales team) to figure out which thing to invest their time into.
Or, as another example, one thing that makes Etsy incredible is how in touch they are with their community. They really care about the people that use their product, which not only makes the product better, but it makes the company’s mission feel even more tangible. However, there were times while I worked there that our dedication to the community actually wound up preventing us from taking risks or even from making changes that would have been positive on the whole, but misunderstood by the community.
I’ve been told by my therapist in the past how important it is to know yourself well and accept your strengths and weaknesses. The knowledge that I’m more prone to interject when I shouldn’t makes me more conscious of it, and more open to admitting when I mess up and let my weaknesses get the best of me. A company understanding the drawbacks to their approach or culture can help leaders minimize the pain for employees, increasing velocity and collaboration. Instead of asking ourselves or our coworkers or our companies to radically change who they are, I think all we can really ask is for awareness and an attempt to mitigate the downsides.
The only crime, in the end, is the refusal to acknowledge at all.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by + 370,437 people.
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