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Lessons - The Standard You Don't Enforce (Scott) · Success Story with Scott Clary

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  In this lessons episode I'm talking about confrontation, not fights or blowups,
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  just the small everyday moments where something bothers you and you say nothing.
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  For example, for six months I watched someone on my team miss a standard that I'd set
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  and I'd never say a word. I'll walk you through what that cost me,
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  what I learned from studying how Nick Sabin and Pixar handled the same problem,
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  and why staying quiet is never as neutral as it feels.
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  Today I want to talk about confrontation, not this dramatic version of it,
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  not blowing up or telling someone off, just this everyday version of confrontation,
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  right? Someone on your team misses a deadline or there's a conversation that you need to have
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  with your partner or your spouse that keeps getting pushed or a friend does something that bothers
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  you when you say nothing or just something isn't sitting right and you know it, but addressing it
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  feels like it's more trouble than it's worth so you just let it go and then you tell yourself
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  you're being patient or reasonable or mature or whatever and maybe sometimes that's true,
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  but most of the time if I'm being honest with myself it's just that I don't want to have
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  uncomfortable conversation and I just don't want confrontation in my life, that's it.
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  And I want to talk about how the cost of avoiding confrontation it's a lot higher than it feels
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  like in the moment and I know this because I lived it pretty recently with somebody on my own team.
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  So for about six months, my main editor who I love to death, he's amazing. He was posting
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  episodes late, not every time, but often enough that it had become a real pattern. So it could be
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  a good day late, sometimes two days late, and every time it happened I noticed and I checked the
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  feed and I'd see the episode hadn't gone up and when I was supposed to and I felt this little flicker
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  of frustration, but then I just move on without saying anything. And this story I was telling myself
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  was that it wasn't a big enough deal, that the episodes were still going up, the quality was fine,
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  the show was fine. And making an issue out of a day or two felt like I was being the kind of boss
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  and nobody wanted to work for, right? I was just nitpicking over something small when everything
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  else was running so well. So I just kept letting it go, week after week, month after month. But
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  here's what was actually true. I actually genuinely cared. I wanted to stick to a schedule and a routine.
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  I just didn't want to be the person who said so. And there is a real difference between
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  something genuinely not mattering to you and something mattering to you, but you're not wanting to
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  deal with it. And I knew which one it was for me. See, I had set a standard for my podcast, my show
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  that I wasn't holding and every week that I didn't say anything to my editor, I was making a choice.
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  And it wasn't a passive choice. It was an active choice to choose my own comfort over choosing
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  something that I said I cared about. And when I finally had the conversation, it took maybe 10
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  minutes. It was calm. It was direct. It was really nothing. It was a type of conversation that should
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  have happened in week two, but those six months had done something. They had turned this simple,
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  easy conversation into this one that now it's six months of silence sitting behind it.
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  It wasn't just about late episodes anymore. It was also about why I waited so long to say anything.
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  I had made a small problem into a more complicated problem by just basically doing nothing.
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  Now, the reason most of us do this, and I include myself here for sure, is that the word
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  confrontation immediately makes you picture something adversarial. Like if you confront someone,
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  you're starting a fight or you're making them feel bad or you're being the difficult person in
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  the room. And because we don't want to be that person, we go all the way to the other extreme
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  and just say nothing. But I think that's the wrong response. I think that's the wrong way to look
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  at it. And honestly, when I was researching a little bit for this podcast, I found two great stories.
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  The first is Nick Sabbath. Nick is the best example I can think of in somebody who understands
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  how to use conflict productively. If you don't follow college football, he coached Alabama for 17
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  years. He won seven national championships. He had a record of two or one and 29. And those numbers
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  alone are insane. But the numbers aren't really the point. The point is how we built this team and
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  this club and this franchise. Because when you actually study his program, all the tactical stuff,
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  all the recruiting, it's almost secondary to something much simpler. The man was relentless
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  about standards. And he never, ever let them slide. And he had a phrase for it. He said, you have
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  to challenge people to do things a certain way, reinforce it when they do and confront them when
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  they don't. And the thing is he didn't treat confrontation like this unpleasant thing you
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  occasionally have to deal with. It wasn't separate from the coaching. It was the coaching.
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  Take that piece out and the whole thing falls apart. But here's the part about his story that
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  really stayed with me. There was a stretch where Alabama went on a 19 game winning streak, 19 games
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  in a row. And you would think that would be the peak, right? Everything's clicking. The culture
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  is at its strongest. But Saban said the opposite happened. Somewhere in the middle of that streak,
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  things started to quietly drift. So players stopped asking what time practice started and started
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  asking why they had to practice at all on Mondays. Nobody made some big decision to stop caring.
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  It just happened gradually because they were winning. And winning made it feel like pushing on
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  things was unnecessary. Like the standard was taking care of itself. But what Saban understood
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  was that it wasn't. Standards never take care of themselves. They hold because someone is actively
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  holding them. The moment you stop, they start to erode. And it's not fast, it's not dramatic,
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  it's just a little bit, little by little at a time. And by the time you notice the drift,
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  you've already lost so much ground and it's hard to get back. And this happens in work,
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  in relationships, in life. He also said something that I keep coming back to. He said,
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  some of the greatest leaders in history were not adored, but respected. So stop trying to please
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  everyone and do what you believe is best. And I think what that really means in practice
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  is that caring about someone and being honest with them aren't two different things. They're
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  the same thing. And when you actually respect someone, you don't just absorb everything and smile.
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  You tell them the truth and that's what respect actually looks like. This is where productive
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  confrontation comes in. And Saban isn't the only example of this. There's a story from Pixar
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  that I think about a lot that I think ties into this nicely. So in the late 90s, Pixar was
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  working on Toy Story 2. And they had already changed the entire industry with the first Toy Story.
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  And on the surface, Toy Story 2 seemed like it was moving along fine, like the team was working,
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  everything's progressing, deadlines are being hit. But underneath all of that, the film had a real
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  problem. The story just wasn't landing. The emotional core, the thing that makes a Pixar movie
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  feel like a Pixar movie wasn't there. And the people who could feel that, the senior creative
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  people who had been through enough projects to know that something was off, they weren't saying
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  it directly enough. Because at that point, so much time and money and effort had gone into the
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  project that saying, this isn't working, almost felt disloyal. Like, you were discounting everything
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  the team had already sacrificed. Ed Katmo, who had co-founded and ran Pixar, wrote about this later
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  in his book Creativity Inc. He described how they had built something called the Brain Trust,
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  which was a group of their most experienced creative people who would watch rough cuts
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  and then just tell you exactly what they thought. No softening, no politics, just honest feedback.
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  And the whole point of that room was the goal wasn't to be polite. The goal was to get the film
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  right. And Katmo knew from experience that you couldn't get there without people being willing
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  to say the hard thing out loud. So when they finally ran Toy Story 2 through that process,
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  it was brutal. The film wasn't good enough and they were nine months from the release date when
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  they got that news. Nine months when they went through this Brain Trust process. Now, most studios
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  in that position would have shipped it. Told themselves they'd do better next time moved on.
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  Pixar went back in and rebuilt the emotional core of the entire film and the time they had left.
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  And Toy Story 2 came out and made over $500 million and still holds a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes.
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  Now, here's the thing about that story that gets me every time I think about it.
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  Katmo didn't just encourage people to speak up. He had to build an entire formal system.
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  The Brain Trust, specifically because he knew that without it, the default would always be
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  silence. And it's not because people were dishonest. It's not because they didn't care.
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  It's just because staying quiet is easier. It's comfortable. You tell yourself it'll probably
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  sort itself out. And Pixar, a company full of some of the smartest creative people on the planet,
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  literally had to build a room and a process specifically to fight that instinct. Because Katmo
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  knew that if he didn't force honesty into the workflow, comfort would win every time.
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  Now, most of us aren't running a movie studio and we don't have a Brain Trust,
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  but it's the same thing whether you're managing a team of two or running a company. At some point,
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  you just have to decide you're going to be the person who says the thing. Not because it's easy,
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  but because you've decided that the standard actually matters. This is where productive
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  competition comes in. And here's the thing that I had to unlearn. I used to think that staying quiet,
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  that not having the conversation, that not having any confrontation was a neutral move,
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  that not saying something when a standard slip was just keeping the peace and not adding to the drama.
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  But silence is never actually neutral. When you stay quiet, you're always sending a message whether
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  you mean to or not. So either you didn't notice, which tells people that you're not paying attention,
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  or you noticed and you didn't say anything, which tells them the standard wasn't worth defending.
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  And both of these things over time teach people around you that your lines and your standards
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  are really just suggestions. That the easiest way to operate around you is to just test things
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  and see what actually happened. And the longer you stay quiet, the worse it gets. Avoidance doesn't
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  make the problem go away. It just keeps it alive and it adds resentment on top of it.
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  And every week that you don't address something, the gap between what you're tolerating
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  and what you actually want gets a little bit wider. And if you let that go long enough,
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  that gap doesn't feel temporary anymore, it just becomes how things are. I've seen this everywhere.
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  I've seen business partnerships where someone accepts terms they resent because negotiating feels
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  awkward and they carry that resentment for months until it poisons the whole relationship.
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  I've seen personal relationships where someone absorbs something that bothers them and they just
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  keep absorbing it and they keep telling themselves they're being patient. And then one day it comes
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  out in a way that is totally added proportion to whatever triggered it. And the other person is
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  completely blindsided like where is this coming from? It was coming from six months of things that
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  never got said. It didn't come from nowhere. I mean, I've had my own version of this Alabama thing
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  too. Like stretches in my business where things are going well enough that I stopped holding the
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  line on stuff that mattered to me. Things were working. Revenue was up. Podcast was growing.
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  So I let little things slide. And every time without fail, something eventually broke in a way
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  that was way bigger and messier than one honest 10-minute conversation would have been.
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  So I'm still working on all this, honestly. And every time I need to address something,
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  there's still a part of me that starts looking for a reason to wait. Maybe one more week,
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  maybe it resolves on its own. Maybe I'm overthinking it. That instinct is still there. What's
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  different now is that I recognize it pretty quickly for what it actually is, which is just not
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  wanting to be uncomfortable. That's it. That's the whole thing. And what helped me most is just
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  thinking about confrontation different. So when I tell someone directly that something isn't working,
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  I'm not being harsh. I'm saying this matters enough to me to be straight with you about it. I'd
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  rather have 10 awkward minutes than spend the next few months quietly working around a problem that
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  I never addressed. And the people who never push back on you, who always tell you everything is fine
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  and absorb every frustration without saying a word, they're not actually being kind. They're
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  just avoiding the same discomfort you are, even in my personal relationship. Gina and I talk about
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  this. One of the things that we've landed on is that we'd rather have small uncomfortable conversations
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  early than a big one later. Say it when it's a pebble, not when it's a boulder. And the result of that
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  is that most of our hard conversations are actually pretty short. Like a few minutes,
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  clear the air done. The things that could have turned into weeks of tension, get handled before
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  they ever get that far. Because the blowups, the fights that feel like they came out of nowhere,
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  they almost never actually come out of nowhere. They come from a long trail of smaller moments
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  where someone could have said something and didn't. Remember, the standard you don't enforce
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  becomes a standard you accept. And the conversation you keep putting off doesn't get easier with time.
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  It just gets heavier. And most of those conversations, if you actually just go and have them
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  are shorter and less painful than the version that you've been building up in your head.