Kevin Hale - How to Work Together

Uh, these are some guys I saw in Kyoto, and they're tearing down a scaffolding, and I just think they're amazingly poetic in how they do their work.

So, in a startup, founders basically have to figure out how to optimize for a relationship that lasts for like 10 years, and that's a crazy thing to do with someone you might only know for a couple of months or have only known in a sort of work setting.

And the thing is, like, the only models for understanding that kind of relationship actually come probably from our parents. So, I'd like to start off with some marriage research.

This is John Gottman; he studied marriages in Seattle. He's been featured in This American Life and a bunch of different places. And basically, he has a cool magic trick: he can watch a couple fight about something for 15 minutes and predict with 85% accuracy whether they'll be divorced or not, four years from now.

If he watches them for an hour and have them also share their hopes and dreams, his prediction rating goes up to 94%. And so this is the same videos they would show to priests, psychologists, psychiatrists, marriage counselors, successfully married couples, and they don't predict better than random chance.

And so, John, he's figured something out: there's something about the way we will have an argument that determines longevity. And one of the most surprising things that he discovered was that it's not that successfully married people, who will last a long time, that they never fight.

Turns out, everybody fights, and we all fight about the exact same things: money, kids, sex, time, jealousy, and the in-laws. Time is usually, "What are we gonna do with our free time?" Uh, and the thing that's interesting is, like, I think all of these map out to the stuff that we're gonna fight about in a company.

And so you, with your co-founders, are gonna have these issues. And the thing is, what's nice about knowing everyone fights and that you know what you're gonna fight about is that we can make a plan for figuring out how to deal with this one situation that will determine whether we will work together on the thing that we're so passionate about down the road.

The other thing that John Gottman figured out is that there are four major things we want to avoid when we're fighting, and when we do these things, they will create sort of leading indicators that the relationship is in serious trouble. I'm gonna go through each one of these.

So, criticism—uh, this is basically like you're talking with someone, and you're like, "Hey, you know what? I have a serious concern about this bug that we are trying to fix, and I'm really worried about this thing, and I'm not sure that we're going to be able to deploy on time."

And someone comes up and says, "Well, you know what? I don't like is the fact that you leave a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink." And criticism is basically this idea that we don't fight on one topic; we start trying to bring all these other issues into play instead of addressing the one issue at hand.

Dangerous contempt—this is a pretty easy one. It's the intention to insult. So basically, I say, "Hey, I'm worried about this bug, and we're not going to be able to deploy on time," and someone says, "I don't like your face," right? That's contempt.

And what you want to avoid is making things personal, right? Because we're in a business. This one, um, kind of easy to understand is that someone not owning responsibility about the problem, and so we can't move forward because someone won't admit that there's a problem out there.

We defend that we haven't done anything wrong, and therefore, there can't be resolution between two people. The other person thinks there's a problem. This one is a super dangerous one, and it's when basically you're like, "Hey, I got a problem," and the person just walks away, won't engage, won't talk to you, and so there can be no way to create any kind of resolution.

So just as you wouldn't do this without, uh, doing some of this, we want to make a plan. And I'm going to talk about four different things that we can do that help avoid and protect us from those four horsemen.

The first one is divide and conquer, and this feels pretty straightforward, but you want to do this early in the relationship with your co-founders and in the early stages of your company. So here's our list again of the types of things that we might have problems with.

In the early stages of the start, let's say Adora and I are doing a startup together; it's just her and me. Then what you want to do is just kind of say like, "Oh, who's responsible for what stuff?" And what this will do is like, if there's a problem in that category, then that person that we have assigned ahead of time to be in charge will be the ones that will ultimately either make the decision or ultimately are responsible.

This protects us from defensiveness. So notice here on jealousy, this is about competition usually, and so usually in the early stages of your startup, you should not be worried about competition. Competition is not usually what kills you in the very early stages of your company.

As your company ages, it might change and look something like this: you'll assign things to different sort of positions and heads, and as a result, then when their problems come up, you know basically that sort of is delegated.

Now, what happens if, uh, things go out of hand even up at those sort of levels? Well, basically, what you want to do is decide after you delegate who has ownership, determine what is success and failure. You want to know also ahead of time, "Hey, we've divided up the task," but we also want to know is like, "Hey, when is there going to be interference with a person that is supposed to be leading these decisions? What is considered like success enough that we shouldn't be interfering, just let them do what they think is best, and what is considered really bad so that we have to interfere, and something has to be done about it?"

So in this case, good examples would be like, "Hey, you know, if we've successfully fundraised, like we don't need to talk or like replace the person that's responsible for that." Uh, if we're shipping on time, if we're rated top three amongst our sort of peers, or we've built a referral program that's working, hey, we don't need to be criticizing the person that's working on the stuff or they're doing a good job.

On the corollary, we want to define, "Hey, what are the things that basically are going to trigger conversations, really hard conversations? Like, hey, if we hit this sort of area, we need to put the brakes on and we need to discuss what's going on and actually try to resolve these problems."

A lot of people like to delegate stuff, but they don't have a way of saying, "Hey, when are we going to have a conversation about this when there's trouble?" And these are really, really easy to do, and the reason you want to do these early while you're sober—emotionally sober—is because once you get angry and emotions come into play, then you might not be thinking rationally.

Now, ultimately, in the end, usually it's the CEO in the company who has the final say. Now, you as a team can decide differently how you want to resolve it if you just, if you divvy up the stuff. But ultimately, whoever's the CEO usually is the one who resolves it, and if there's problems with the CEO, then it's the board.

In the early stages of a startup, the board is usually composed of just the founders, so you have to ultimately work it out. The second defense against the four horsemen is knowing yourself. This will protect you from stonewalling, and what I mean is, what is your attachment style?

So there was all this research that was done in the 1960s about how people approach relationships, and basically it was determined that there's sort of three major types. There's a secure attachment style, and that means basically, it's like, "Hey, you know what? I don't have a problem going up to people, uh, relying on them and having them rely on me and sort of like us creating a relationship. I don't mind being vulnerable, and I don't mind other people being vulnerable with me." That's called a secure attachment style.

There's an anxious style, so there's a type of person that will be like, "You know what? I kind of don't get enough love as not as much as I want. I kind of want to like hold on to people, and I kind of want to have people constantly confirm with me that they want to be with me." I feel like it's a little difficult.

And then there's another point: the kind of person just like, "I find it kind of difficult creating relationships with people, and I kind of want to run away sometimes because it's really scary or I'm worried that I'm going to mess it up."

And the thing that's super important here, especially with your co-founder, is you want to know your co-founder's attachment style, because that's going to dictate how you are going to be able to resolve and understand your differences.

Now what it turns out, oddly enough, is that an anxious attachment person and an avoidant attachment person—these are the two most common in the world. There's not that many well-developed secure people out there. They tend to want to be with one another—so the person that wants to run away and the person that wants to cling.

And so what you have is someone who needs space to make a decision and to process problems, and tension and someone who needs validation constantly to process conflict and issues. And so when those two people are together and they don't realize what the other person needs, they don't realize that they're going to have to bend to sort of make it work.

There's lots of good books on attachment styles; there's a wonderful Wikipedia page that covers it. I would recommend watching this YouTube video; it's from School of Life, and what I would highly recommend is basically understanding that like if you're with someone that is of the opposite type, that you're gonna have to do work either to reach across the aisle.

Like, if you're an anxious person, you're gonna—and you're talking to an avoidant person—you just have to realize, "Oh, that person needs space,” but that doesn't mean they're running away from you. And if you're an avoidant person with an anxious person, that if someone needs your attention or if you need your space, then you have to let them know, "It's like, hey, I'm going to be back. I realize that you're going to need an answer for this. I'm going to go away; I'm going to figure stuff out, and I promise a time that we will deal with this."

Documented process—so this will protect you from criticism—and so basically when you're emotionally sober, it's the best time to create a process for dealing with disagreements.

And the reason you want to do this is because once you're upset and angry and filled with emotions, you are not going to be thinking straight. And so the odds are you might say something you regret; you might say something that you don't mean, and the other person might do so, and then you will have a much different problem than the bug not being fixed and deployed on time.

So one of my favorite examples of this comes from the company called Mater, and they created a spreadsheet for dealing with disagreements. Basically, it's a disagreement decision framework, and basically it just talks about, it's like, "Hey, when we have a disagreement, we should just document it.”

This helps make things really, really transparent, makes us understand both sides very, very clearly. We talk about the different options; we say who made the decision, what the decision was, the date it was done, and then rationale.

And so when we walk through this process, if we've decided this ahead of time, then it means that we are not afraid when disagreements come up. It's like, "Oh, we have a process for dealing with this, and we will figure it out by filling out Excel."

There's lots of different ways to do this; you don't have to follow their sort of very specific framework. They have lots of really great justifications in their article; you just have to agree ahead of time what you want to do.

So therefore, when you are upset, you just go, "Okay, great, we have a process for this," and the process says, "Oh, it says go have a timeout or eat a bologna sandwich or like take a nap first, and then we'll figure out what we have to do."

It could be a process where it's like, "Hey, if there's a real disagreement and both sides feel equally strong, we will flip a coin, and then that will be the decision for the test of time. We will let Lady Luck decide." It doesn't matter, you just have to both agree.

This strategy will protect you from contempt. So the way that you avoid making things personal is you have to figure out a way of communicating with another in a way that will not be threatening.

There's an amazing book on this; it’s called Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, and it helps you be honest with other people without criticizing, without insulting, without putting down other people.

And the magic comes in the structure that feels somewhat fake for people who are not into being touchy-feely. Um, basically when you're giving some kind of criticism, you want to basically have it in this format: “So when some observation, I feel an emotion, because I'm needing some universal need, would you be able to request?”

So we're just going to break down each one of these different parts, and they're all—every single one of these are tricky, and it's a thing that a lot of people will try to do, and you'll spend your whole life trying to get really good at, and it gets really difficult.

So the first one is you need to make an observation versus having an evaluation. So basically, what you want to do is start your disagreement or criticism by anchoring it to something that is concrete. You do not want it to be something that is connected to opinion; it should be something that you actually saw or heard because therefore you can't disagree with something that actually happened versus something I heard or a rumor or something that seems emotional or something that seems like an opinion.

So I'll give you an example. Um, an observation would be, "You said that you'd send that document last week, and I haven't received it." All right? So that is a great observation. An evaluation that someone might say instead in the heat of the moment is, "You're lazy."

Right? That kind of feels like an observation, but it's not; it's evaluating the person. Give you another example: "Your work is sloppy," that is not objective. Instead, "Hey, three of the numbers in this report were inaccurate." That's where you want to start.

You're always late—you want to be really careful because that's a generalization, it's an evaluation. Observation: "Hey, you arrived 10 minutes late to the meeting this morning." Evaluation: "You ignored me." Observation: "I sent you two emails, and I haven't received the response."

Notice when we start with observation, we start with a fact that can't be refuted, and so we're not going to end up arguing about something else. Notice all those other evaluations; they immediately will trigger an emotion in you, and so that's why you want to be really careful that when you start this criticism that you don't start with one of those.

The next is we have to talk about our emotions, right? So I saw this irrefutable observation, and it made me feel something. And what we have to be really careful of is not saying thoughts but instead talking about feelings, which is kind of odd, but it's connected to the next point out in the structure.

So an emotion will be, “I feel frustrated right now." A thought would be—and it could be put in the same structure as—like, "I feel that you aren't taking this seriously." And the way you can tell if something is a thought or a feeling is you substitute the phrase "I think" with "I feel," and it still works.

So "I think frustrated" doesn't work, so that's a feeling. "I think that you aren't taking this seriously"—oh, that's a thought. There are a couple of emotions that we have to be particularly careful of. One is anger because anger is usually tied to a bunch of hosts of other things.

So when someone says that—"I feel angry"—or you realizing that you feel angry, you want to be really, really specific about what's causing the anger, what's triggering it. The other tricky emotions are evaluative emotions, and usually what you need to figure out is what underlines that evaluation.

So I'll give you an example. So, "I feel blamed," right? Someone else is evaluating me. "I feel blamed." The impact actually is, "I feel scared." Someone is blaming me, and so I feel scared.

So it takes a lot of work to understand that when someone is giving me some—if I'm feeling like some kind of judging feeling, what is that the core root of it? Other examples are, "I feel judged." The actual impact is, "I feel resentful." "I feel misunderstood." The impactful statement is actually, "I feel frustrated." "I feel rejected." The real impact is, "I feel hurt."

It's super hard; it's super, super hard. Uh, I'm gonna have a link inside of this presentation to a PDF; it's three pages of evaluative emotions and impacted feelings you probably actually are feeling and then connects us to a universal need that you need to overcome it, which leads us to our next thing.

Every negative emotion lies an unmet universal need, and so what that means is that like when you're feeling one of these—frustrated or blamed or scared or hurt feelings—there's something that's missing that you're going to need.

And the thing that's really tricky about universal needs is you have to be careful of realizing, is it a strategy or is it a need, and is it truly universal? So I'll give an example, right? You might be able to say, "I need a sandwich"; that is not a universal need.

So you have to be really careful, right? And then you might say, "I need a sandwich to give me nourishment," that's more like a strategy. A much better way might be, uh, let me see here—you might say something like, "I need you to copy me on every single email."

But the thing is, that's not a universal need; that becomes very, very specific. A universal need would be, “I need some transparency about this process." You have to be careful of not making needs about something that's very specific to yourself or just that situation because once it's a universal need, then it's something that everyone can agree that everyone should sort of have.

So other universal needs are like, "I need support," and the way you turn it not into a universal need is by saying something like, "I need support from you" because not everyone needs support from Henry, right? But everyone does need support. And it says you include from you; it stops being universal.

So you want to be really careful of this. Okay, requests versus demand. So at the very end, so basically we said, like, "Hey, I've noticed something that can't be refuted."

"I've told you about a feeling and how it impacts me, and I told you that basically it results in some universal need that we all can agree that we need to have," and now we get to saying what we'd like to have changed as a result.

And what you want to make is a request, not a demand. The difference is that a request is an invitation to the other person to meet our universal needs. It's much easier to be able to do than to say, "Like I order you to do something."

So what we want to do is make it very specific our requests. "I request for you to be more respectful" is not that great because who defines what's respectful? My version of respectful might be different from someone else's.

Your request should be something like, "I request that you arrive to meetings on time." Say what you want; don't say what you don't want. So what a lot of people will say is that, "I request that you don't dismiss other people's ideas straight away."

The thing is it doesn't indicate the behavior that you do want, and so it becomes really difficult to act on. A better one would be, "I request that when a team member shares an idea, you ask two or three probing questions before sharing a conclusion and then stay curious."

And so sometimes you might make a request, and someone might say no, and what you need to do is not just freak out that the whole process isn't working. The idea is actually to be like, "Hmm, maybe I haven't put this request in a way that can meet more needs than just myself. Could I do this in a way so that they can understand and be on board for everyone to be sort of involved?"

If you want to learn more, there's a really great article on delivering constructive feedback in different situations by Dave Bailey. This is on Medium; I'll have a link to it. He goes into far more detail and is a very, very good starting point for giving out this really hard feedback.

We all know what technical debt is, right? So when we're building out software really, really quickly, and sometimes you're like, "Well, that's not going to scale really well, and it's going to be dirty and quick, but I'm going to get it out the door, and I'm just going to put that in the back of my mind—it's something I have to fix later."

Well, in our relationships with one another, you will incur emotional debt, and unlike technical debt, you really don't want that to go for very long. You want to pay this down every day.

So it turns out also in John Gottman's research that it wasn't that people who were really good at being in a marriage, um, only thought about really big things. It turns out they would immediately bring up stuff even when it's really tiny or small; they would never let a small thing grow to be a medium thing and then eventually a big thing.

They immediately will talk about it; it's like, "Oh man, uh, can you close your mouth while you're chewing? Um, real quick; it's just like kind of bothering me right now,” and then do it in a way that's sort of respectful.

And so, like when you're with your co-founders and you're in this really sensitive relationship and you're finding stuff that's being really troubling like you can communicate those needs really quickly, and you will prevent those small things from becoming big things.

The best way to start doing this is the practice. So at YC, we call these level three conversations. So level one is that informal conversation we have with other people where it's just like data exchange, passing information back and forth.

Level two conversations have some emotions, talk about some things that are personal. Level three conversations, they're relational; they're engaged with something that's happening right now between two people that is super, super important.

It is a deep dive into what it might be really troubling or what might be really mattering to two people, and in a startup, there's a lot of things that's going to matter to all of the people working on the company.

So let's go through some examples of things that you guys can do after this talk. So, goals; some good ones are what are our short-term goals for the company? You'd be surprised at how often people are not on the same page about this. Are we using the right metrics? We've got lectures on those; the answer is I hope so by now.

And then, are we—uh, that's supposed to be hitting our goals—not hiring our goals—are we hitting our goals? Roles; who's responsible for what's super sensitive, right? So is it clear who is responsible for what? Like just have that conversation.

Do we agree that the current division makes the most sense? And this might be super simple answers, but if there is any kind of disagreement, we want to hash that out. And performance, okay, so is our workload distributed in an optimal manner today?

Do we all feel a high level of dedication and motivation right now? Great thing to just check on every day. And then what mechanisms are in place for providing feedback to one another? Have we carved out time for paying down emotional debt?

Do we feel like we can have these level three conversations at any time? Do we have a process in place for thinking through this stuff so that we can be honest about where we are in our company?

Going to sum things up: how to work together—everyone fights, so you want to make a plan. You need to figure out what's your attachment style, what's your roles, what's your goals, and a process before emotions get involved.

Do it while you're sober; use nonviolent communication to share honest feedback without criticism. And then pay down emotional debt on a regular basis. This is the most healthy way that you will make sure that things will not turn into a giant blow-up.

You can start having hard conversations right now. There's no doubt in my mind that there's probably some issue that the two of you or three of you or four of you, or God forbid seven of you, are not talking about.

Okay, thank you very much. I'll let you guys mingle.