Follow These Steps to Scale Your Business Without Burnout w/ Jason Rosoff

Now , background he's been tech industry , helped scale Khan Academy you've probably heard of that one or so and then went over to building great companies through great conversations . His definition of success , I think , is going to make you really really think and specifically , how he goes back to his colleges and how success was defined for him .

Tell me with this , Jason Rossoff's going to blow your mind Radical Canada , radical Leadership and ways to do things differently . Let's get on with your success . Here's Jason . So , jason , let me get your definition of success .

The word that has come to mind most often when I think of success is growth , and so I think that it seems straight , except for the fact that people often get to the end of the year and they think of growth unidimensionally , like just in terms of revenue .

But one of the ways that I'm most interested in growing this year and acknowledging growth as success is to look back and say I am smarter and faster at doing the things that I do every day at the end of this year than I was at the start of this year .

It was meant we had to fundraise every year and that was a stressful thing and I wasn't directly involved in the pitches to potential donors , but I was building the products that Sal was going out and selling folks and saying we want you to invest in the future of this company and so , even though we always kept our eye on the ball of making sure that

students achieve their goals , that was like our number one definition of success , like can we help students achieve their academic goals . There were other forms of success which were like can we fundraise enough to actually grow the company in the way that we wanted ?

Someone else was defining success for a lot of my life and I really bought into that . I was competitive academically , I really wanted to do well . And then I got to undergrad and I had this really eye-opening experience . I went to business school , to the Stern Business School at NYU , for undergrad . It was very prestigious , it was great . I hated it .

I absolutely , I absolutely hated it . I mean , I loved a lot about my time there , but in particular , the environment there . So there's this thing that existed when I went , called the Stern Curve , which basically meant that they graded on a curve and only 5% of students could get A's .

25 or 35% of students would get B's and everybody else would get below that . And I was like that seems kind of stupid because , like , is it really that relative , or are there ? Is excellence that easy to distinguish between that you can say , like here's the exact cutoff point below which no one else would be considered doing excellent work .

And so the game was sort of exposed to me in that moment . But worse than the game was how other people responded to the game .

What I've had I've told the story before , but like I had this experience where I was in an accounting 101 class and one of my classmates started having a grandma's seizure , so like one of those really scary , like twitching , shaking etc .

And the teacher , you know , immediately went out and called 911 and was like getting the campus security there and all this other stuff and the students around me started to cheat on the quiz that we were taking and I was like wow , I was like this , this it's all BS Like this is , it is like the definition of success that I've sort of dedicated my life to

it was exposed in that moment as completely false , and so I really do feel like that . There was a pivotal moment there where I was like I need to define what I want out of life , like what I'm looking for out of this experience Because if I let other people define it , the path is clear .

You know what I'm saying Like I'm going to have to live in a world dominated by a bunch of people who can see another human being suffering and decide like that's an opportune moment to get ahead on their quiz score . It was a terrible and life changing experience .

The important thing that I realized was that , for me , I feel most fulfilled when I'm doing a variety of things , as opposed to just being great at one thing , so I'm like a fantastic generalist . That's why CEO is a pretty good role for me , because that can mean anything .

The benefit of it is that I've often found that my desire to pick up new skills introduces me to what I would call adjacent areas of excellence , and some of the best sort of problem solves that I've made over the course of my career is we're not driven by functional knowledge or functional excellence .

They were driven by the knowledge of the sort of intersection between functions or sort of disciplines in business . So I know enough about finance to evaluate whether we should raise debt or explore capital .

I know enough about accounting to make decisions about how we should make sure that we're preparing for taxes at the end of the year not just like managing the money in the bank account and cash flow , but thinking ahead to the implications for taxes and things like that .

That sort of generalist approach has been really , really helpful for helping me scale a business in a bootstrapped way as opposed to a funded way , which is how we scale to an account . Yeah .

But the most important thing about failing is not giving up . I think and again it seems trite , but so many people , for example , they try to do something they're not great at .

They fail at doing the thing they're not great at , and instead of saying I can learn a lot from this and I can do better next time , they say , well , that's just evidence , I shouldn't do that thing again . And I feel like that winds up narrowing the avenues that people have for success , their desire to avoid things that they failed at in the past .

And , from my perspective , I want to keep every avenue of success open to me , so not seeing failure as an impediment to trying

again .

And , in part , what she was trying to do when she coined the term was to put words to dispel a myth , and the myth is that in order to be successful , you have to be willing to be a jerk . That was the myth she felt like .

She was constantly , over the course of her career , presented with this choice of like if you want to be successful , you have to be willing to be a jerk to your team members , and she didn't like that choice .

And so she looked around at the other people who were inspiring her and were being successful as leaders , and she noticed a pattern , which was that there was a type of successful leader that didn't have to make that choice , that was able to be kind and clear with their team at the same time right , that didn't avoid discomfort but also didn't descend into

obnoxious behavior in order to overcome a problem or a challenge .

They focused on both the person in front of them and the problem , the business problem that they were trying to solve , and the reason I got involved with it was I read Radical Candor Actually , technically , I saw a talk that Kim gave first before I read the book and what I felt is what I think a lot of people feel when they read the book for the first

time , which is that Kim put into words a concept that is really difficult to describe and is not necessarily sort of widely understood or accepted , and so this idea of like this is the way that I've been trying to manage my team with heart and mind and hands at the same time , like it's all those things in unison .

To me , that's what Radical Candor is all about . So I reached out to Kim when I was on my way out of Khan Academy and I just said you know , hey , I don't know what's happening in your world , but maybe there's something we can do together , and I was coming off seven years scaling Khan , so there was a for me .

I was like you know , I'm not really looking to jump into anything else , this is very exploratory , but for Kim she was like I feel like this is big opportunity and we should get going right away . Anyway , we compromised .

Six months later we started Radical Candor , the company which still exists , and our goal is to help people put the ideas and principles and behaviors of Radical Candor into practice in their own lives and in their own work , so that they can do the best work of their lives and build the strongest relationships in their career .

At the same time , it draws on a fundamental belief in another human being's ability to impress you to grow and adapt and perform at a higher level . One of the things we love to say around here is that there's no such thing as a B player . Everybody has the capability of doing great work .

Maybe not in their current role , maybe they're not capable of doing great work in their current role , but they have the capability of doing great work somewhere . Part of it , the job of being an effective leader , is figuring out how to put that person in a position where they can do great work .

I think let's come back to Radical Candor and talk about the mistakes that people make , because in this framework , there's three ways to get it wrong and only one way to get it right . Well , that maybe , is overstating it . There are many ways to get it right , but there are even more ways to get it wrong .

It's a better way to say it when we challenge but we don't care . So that's that lower right hand quadrant , kim , and I refer to that as obnoxious aggression . That is being a jerk . Maybe what you're saying is useful is like informationally useful , but it's delivered in such a way that it is completely demotivating to the other person to

hear it . If the goal in our relationships is to see the potential in one another , a goal in any conversation is to help that person take a step in the direction of the potential that they have , of the growth that they're capable of . Training them is a really great way to turn them off the path of growth and development .

It makes sense why , which is if you understand what it is that you're trying to do and someone's offering you a correction of here's a way to do what you're trying to do better . It's easy for an expert to figure out how to integrate that knowledge into what they are doing .

It is very hard for a novice , because one of the examples that I love , there's two studies that I love . One of them is they took novice bowlers and they videotaped them and they had an expert bowler review the videotape with them . In one of the conditions , the expert bowler said oh , you made a mistake here .

You need to avoid turning your foot out the next time that you go up to the line . The other condition the expert bowler pointed out something they did correctly . The improvement that they measured in those two conditions was shocking . The people in the repeat a thing you did well group did improve twice as fast as the people in the criticism group .

It makes sense because our bodies and our minds we have these pathways . They sense memories . If you don't know what good looks like , it's really hard to correct . The most important thing you can do when you're first starting out is help people understand what is working well , especially if you're dealing with people who are more junior or more novice .

There's this great book called Against Empathy . One of the problems with empathy is that it can paralyze us . We start out with the best of intentions , which I want to show this other person that I care about them , but then we get afraid that if we challenge them , that's going to upset them and therefore derail them .

The problem with that is it's a very paternalistic way of looking at another adult human being which is like , if I have information that would be useful to you and I don't share it with you , that is not caring . That is abdication . You know what I'm saying ? That , in my mind , is abdication of care .

We often say that what you really want is compassion , not empathy , Because compassion propels us to act on behalf of the other person , whereas empathy is an internal feeling that might cause us to freeze in the moment and avoid the situation altogether .

Almost no one puts themselves in this quadrant , even though it is incredibly common . The most common example of manipulative insincerity that I see in the workplace is talking about someone instead of talking to that person directly . If you have ever engaged in water cooler chatter , you have behaved in a manipulatively insincere way .

If you have ever had a meeting after a meeting where you say what a disaster that was , can you believe Jason said this ? Can you believe Jason said that you have engaged in manipulative insincerity ? It's actually quite common , but it's also very corrosive .

In any environment where it's okay to talk about someone behind their back which is the most common example it deteriorates trust so rapidly . It normalizes this idea of not addressing issues directly .

That really gets in the way of building any sense of team cohesion or collective culture , because so much is happening behind closed doors and is not being addressed in a way that allows people to grow and develop from the observations that people have of what could be better , that it stunts the growth of the organization and really dissuades them from becoming a

cohesive Okay , so how do we move forward ?

The fastest way out of all of the mistake quadrants is for leaders to demonstrate that they value the corrective feedback that their team has for them , and part of the reason why that's so important is we kind of need to . Feedback is sort of scary .

It feels like the cost is potentially much higher than the benefit , even though we know we can sort of see when we take a , when we zoom out and we take a sort of wide angle view of our lives that failing to give feedback led to significant train crashes . I'm saying down the road like we created the conditions for disasters to happen by not doing this .

This feels very expensive in the moment . So what you're trying to do is raise the market value of feedback , and one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that people feel comfortable criticizing their leader .

Then it becomes much easier for people to accept criticism as part of a natural one of the natural interactions that you have with your peers and your coworkers . So that's thing number one is leaders accepting criticism . A step further is not only accepting it but seeking it . So we call this soliciting feedback .

The most common signal of success in any organization that we work with on Radical Candor is the leaders operationalizing soliciting feedback so they add to their one-on-one agendas or to some process . They have internally a specific time and place each week to solicit feedback from their team members .

I do think that being a leader means and being ready to be a leader means having enough ego strength that you can absorb the sort of input , or correct the corrective input of the people around you , because the hard part about being a leader is your organizational positional authority often just like makes it very scary for other people to tell you what might be

wrong , and that is one of those things that you know what I'm saying , like that we're laying the tracks for a collision . When people observe things that are going wrong but they're afraid to say what's going wrong , like you're .

Those two trains are headed for each other at some point it may be years from now before you get a they crash into each other , but they're destined to crash into each other .

So I have three ways that I do it . I spend five minutes in a one-on-one , 10 minutes maybe once a month talking about , like broad feedback at the organizational level , so in my sort of standing meetings , and 10 more minutes reviewing the results of that survey .

So I'm probably collectively spending two hours a month soliciting feedback and it has helped me catch a lot of small things before they become big things , and I would say that the number one thing that it has done it is I don't I often don't have to wait for that Like .

People will often come to my , to one-on-ones with me with like a hey , I want to talk to you about this thing that I think could have gone better , got it .

From my perspective , sustainable growth is scaling . The reason why sustainable growth is scaling is because sustainable growth is repeatable , whereas growth without scaling the other things that support people is destined to lead to burnout , which , in turn , leads to degraded experiences for clients or customers .

That is the biggest problem that I've seen In the last two decades . A lot of the financial success was achieved in Silicon Valley , where people were working 20 plus hours a day . People were burning the candle at both ends .

What wound up happening was organizations had two options they either had to put golden handcuffs on people , meaning making it so financially disadvantageous to leave the organization that they were forced to stay , or they experienced churn or brain drain , which is where experienced people get burned out by the crazy schedule and they go on to something else .

When you start to think of your company as a product that is experienced primarily by your employees although your client sometimes experience your company as well , depending on what kind of company you have you start to notice the places , the bugs that exist in your company .

One of the most , we followed a really common track where it was like we didn't really have HR . It was external . We hired some contractors basically to do it , kind of part-time for us . As we grew , we started to run into real challenges . People wanted to have kids and we didn't have a parental leave policy .

Then we were scrambling to have a parental leave policy . Someone got sick and they needed to go on medical leave , but we didn't know how to do it . Now what do we do ? Who do we talk to about this ? I went to Sal and I said this is a bug . This is a huge bug in the organization . Here are the ways that I think it is costing us money .

This is affecting the financial success of the organization because we have people looking for new jobs because they're not sure that they could have a kid at this company . He , sal , to his credit , was like I buy that . I wound up taking a dual role at Khan Academy , where I was both chief product and chief people officer .

I brought the design thinking or design centered mindset to the organization and professionalized our internal processes for helping employees . I improved our review process across the organization so people knew better where they stood . I made us write job descriptions for everything that people were doing so they understood what their actual responsibilities were .

It seems really trivial , but it wound up making it so that we it didn't stop the turn immediately , but what it did was it revealed the risks because people felt like we were paying attention to it and were more likely to talk to us as opposed to just saying I got a new job and I'm going to leave . Eventually , it helped us slow the churn down as well .

A lot of people approach things , jason and even in the coaching you do today with the radical candor a lot of people approach things with a goal of I'm going to hit a million , but other people come at it and say I'm going to hit a billion .

In your mindset , what's the difference between a sal or someone that just goes for this massive thing and people that just go for a normal size goal ? How do you see those two differences ?

What I would say is there's a lot of luck involved in those things and timing involved in the billion . I don't think that there is a reasonable way , for example , to achieve the goal of creating another platform like Facebook , where literally every person on the planet is on that platform .

I don't think that that is , and it's certainly not helpful when you start out . The reason why is because it's important to remember what the goals of those organizations were when they first started out . Sal's goal when he first started out was to help tutor his cousins . That was his goal .

He was making videos because there was a time difference between him and the cousins . He was tutoring and he was making these videos and then he got feedback from his cousins which was like hey , we kind of like it better just to watch the video first and then talk to you afterward .

We're liking that more than the live tutoring sessions , and it was from that that Sal was like well , maybe there's something to this and other people might benefit from it .

And you know , facebook is the platform for old people now , but when it started it was a platform literally for college students to be able to sort of like keep track of , get in touch with other college students and the original goal was to like scale to multiple college campuses .

Like the original goal wasn't a billion people , it was only in looking back at the sort of trajectory , there's some storytelling involved , there's some mythology involved in the sort of like how you get to a billion , the overnight success mythology , etc .

When what's really happening is like people are grinding for each additional user at the beginning and if you do something that's exciting and useful to people and easily accessible , that's how you get like hyper growth .

And then what do you see as a difference to the organization ?

Like literally , it affects people physiologically to feel like they can't express what they're thinking to the people that they spend probably the most time with in their lives . Like many people spend more time with their colleagues than they do with their families .

So the effect for people is like there's this when organizations do this well is often a sense of relief , that like we can have real conversations with each other .

And I think it's important to recognize that organizations that focus entirely on criticism like just the things that are going wrong fail at a much higher rate to build a culture of radical candor than organizations that focus on soliciting feedback and focusing on the good stuff , like focusing on praise and what's working well .

So one of the other less one of the other like important things about scaling radical candor is you don't want radical candor to mean getting criticized because that is a that's . That's one of those like train wrecks with waiting to happen .

this the same of I manage others , the way I like to be managed , is one that every manager that I've ever worked with , ever in any capacity , has made like .

That is an error that we all make , and what I'm saying is we need to out , create that instinct , which is to like manage people the way that we want to , and part of radical candor , part of the process of scaling this , is recognizing that it might seem counterintuitive but by role modeling , being humble and willing to accept other people's criticism , that is a

faster way to get people excited about receiving criticism , then criticize .

Hip stands for humble , helpful , in person or in high bandwidth , so that you have two way communication in private when we're criticizing in public , or in private when we're praising , and then not about personality . So that's , that's hip , and this applies to both praise and criticism .

It is equally bad to tell someone is equally unhelpful to tell someone they're a genius as it is to tell someone they're stupid . I think most people instinctively recoil from the idea that telling someone they're stupid might be useful , but often we're like oh , telling someone a genius , like that , seems like a good thing , but it often isn't , because you don't .

Actually that person may not know why what they did was important or what they are , exactly how what they did was useful . So that's hip . And then core really talks about the content of the conversation , and course stands for context , observation , results and next steps .

And so if I was going to give some radically candid praise , I might say hey , you know , in that last meeting when you presented the , the figures on our sales growth for this year and the CEO had a question . The backup slide that you had with all of the details really helped sell the CEO on the accuracy of the the information that we were presenting .

So the context is in the meeting , the observation is like you had , you had the presentation and the backup data .

The result was that the CEO is quite convinced of our , of the direction you're taking , and the next step in that case might be and I you know , I think that's a great practice or habit to be and so make sure to include those things in future present , make sure to include that backup data in future presentations .

The criticism would work the same way , right ? Hey , in that last meeting , when you present to the figures and the CEO asked a question , you didn't have the data to back it up .

It really derailed our ability to make a decision coming out of that meeting to continue to the path that you were suggesting , and so in the future , I'd recommend that you bring some backup data to make sure that you can answer those questions on the spot .

I'll see you next week on the big success podcast .