Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Claire Hughes Johnson (@chughesjohnson), who currently serves as a corporate officer and advisor for Stripe, a global technology company that builds economic infrastructure for the Internet. Claire previously served as Stripe’s chief operating officer from 2014 to 2021, helping grow the company from fewer than 200 employees to more than 6,000. At various times, she led business operations, sales, marketing, customer support, risk, real estate, and all of the people functions, including recruiting and HR.
Prior to Stripe, Claire spent 10 years at Google leading a number of business teams, including overseeing aspects of Gmail, Google Apps, and ultimately consumer operations, as well as serving as a vice president for AdWords Online Sales and Operations, Google Offers, and Google’s self-driving car project.
Claire holds a bachelor’s degree from Brown University and an MBA from Yale University. She serves on the boards of the renewable energy company Ameresco, the multi-platform publication The Atlantic, the self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation, and the customer management software company HubSpot.
Her book is Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Claire, thank you so much for making the time.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I’m so glad to be here. Tim. Thank you for having me on.
Tim Ferriss: And we were talking briefly about how one thing that you’ve observed, I’m just joshing here, of course, a lot of cool people go to Brown. I want to ask about somebody else who seems pretty cool, who I’m not sure went to Brown or not, but that is Fred Kofman and I guess he is the origin of your second favorite operating principle perhaps, “Say the thing you cannot say.” I just love this line.
Claire Hughes Johnson: “Say the thing you think you cannot say.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, there we go. That’s actually such a critical distinction. That is such a critical distinction. I simplified it; that probably tells you a lot. We could psychoanalyze that later, but “Say the thing you think you cannot say.” Can you provide listeners with a bit of context as to what this means and why it is important?
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. I laid out, and I had to think about this for myself, four operating principles for me as a leader and a person, and I shared them with others because I think actually everybody should authentically come up with their own, but this one was the second one. The first one about self-awareness is the one I probably talk about the most with everyone and myself. But the second one is “Say the thing you think you cannot say.”
Tim Ferriss: That’s why I started with the second one.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah, because no one asked me about that. And it’s a lesson that I’ve learned and I think there’s a journey that people go on with this lesson, so we can share about that. But I’ve certainly gone on the journey and the person who was probably one of the most pivotal to me stepping from square one, which is we often just don’t say the thing. We just don’t say it was Fred Kofman. And Fred was, I’m going to get some of this wrong, but as I understand it, he was an accountant by training. He became a professor at MIT, he was teaching accounting. And he grew up in Argentina, by the way, I don’t think he went to Brown. And he had some sort of life revelation that he was not living with the dimension, like the true dimensions of his being and his values. And what he needed to do was stop teaching accounting and become a leadership coach and advisor.
And he wrote this book Conscious Business, which I recommend to, I don’t recommend a lot of business books, I’m just going to be perfectly honest Tim, I often read the beginning of business books and then I never finished them. But Conscious Business, I had read all of it and he formed this firm called Axialent at the time that Sheryl Sandberg hired at Google. So Fred and his team come in to start working with Sheryl Sandberg’s organization of which I was a member of management and then leadership. But initially I was sort of one of the, I don’t know, senior managers, not anyone particularly special. And to Sheryl’s great credit, because not a lot of companies at the stage Google was at were investing two, three days of management training and leadership training. We all went through these 360 assessments. They gave us these report outs, and then they put us in these boot camps, with Fred and his team.
Tim Ferriss: And just for a snapshot in time, when you say at that scale, what was the status of Google at that time, roughly?
Claire Hughes Johnson: So I joined Google in May of 2004, and it was maybe around 1,800 people. I mean, there were a lot of contractors, I’m going to be honest. But I think in terms of full-time employees, and it was by the way, for me, the biggest place I’d ever worked. So I was like, this place is huge. And then just fast forward, I left Google in 2014 and it was almost 60,000 people, so whoa. But anyway, so I would say that the excellent engagement with Sheryl and her team was probably 2000. Google went public later, sorry, I joined right before the IPO, which was in August of ’04 and then in ’05 I would say is when we had. So Google actually was doubling every year though, so it was —
Tim Ferriss: Good timing.
Claire Hughes Johnson: — probably three to 4,000. But Google had gone public but was still maturing and establishing especially on the sort of investment in management and organizational skills. But Sheryl, of course, ahead of her time on things like that was making the investment and had the budget that was a benefit of Google as we certainly had nice margins, Tim that we could spend on management training. And so we did this boot camp with Axialent, but one of the things that Fred has is he has some really great frameworks. He has one about being a victim versus being a player, but one of his frameworks is how do you take what he calls your left-hand column? So you and I are talking right now, say we’re having a conversation in the workplace, our brain is always operating in the background. It’s often thinking some things about the conversation, about the person. Sometimes it’s thinking, what should I be doing? What do I want to have for dinner? But we have this ongoing monologue in our brain.
And the left-hand column with respect to look, it’s about our conversation, Fred was really pushing us as a group. He’s like, “How do you…” he’d say, “…detoxify…” can’t do his accent, “…detoxify the left-hand column and actually say it,” say the thing, and then we’d go through these exercises. And so this was sort of a light bulb for me, which is really about giving hard feedback. At that time I was in management training. But what I’ve come to learn is not only is say the thing you think, you cannot say certainly about giving feedback and being more direct in your management conversations, but I actually think it’s a really tremendous leadership skill, which is to get in a room. And I don’t care if I’m in charge of the team or I’m just a person on a board. I’m on some boards now and we’re sitting there and there’s often an unspoken thing. You’ve been there, Tim, you seem like someone who would actually put the thing on the table. I think you and I are —
Tim Ferriss: Sometimes to my detriment, but yes. I think I need help. And this is where I’m going to ask you if you could give an example. It could be hypothetical or real of this type of experience, and also the detoxifying, which —
Claire Hughes Johnson: How do you detoxify?
Tim Ferriss: — the gentrifying your inner language so that you don’t sound like a complete asshole.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Right, totally. And I think mean, the short answer is you’ve got to ask some stuff as a question often to stop yourself from making a big judgment. But Tim, yeah, I think what I pick up in you and from listening to you is you’re willing to take some risks. And so I think this is really about risk-taking and saying something that you’re not sure you should say, but you’re going to put it out there. And then the question is how do you do it with as much finesse as possible so that you don’t end up having blowback? Which believe me, I’ve sometimes said the thing I think I cannot say and had people look at me like, oh, my goodness, but most of the time I’m reading the room right.
Here’s an example, which is, I mean just classic more of a business example, but it certainly happens in my personal life too. So we went through various business planning types of tactics at Stripe, but one of them we were using for a while was your classic quarterly business review. You have teams come in, we’ve given them a template, and we say, “Please fill out these things. Let’s see your data. Let’s see where you are versus your goals. What’s your strategy? What’s your plan? Write this memo. We’re all going to read the memo and then we’re going to have this discussion about how you’re doing.” And often teams come in and they want more resources or they want us to solve something or decide something. And we’re of course saying like, “Well, it’s actually you. You’re supposed to be deciding and solving.” But it’s a discussion with the executive team.
And I’m sitting in one of these reviews with a team that’s primarily working on an area of the product. So it’s product and engineering leaders. It’s not my part of the org that I run, but I’m invited to be there and I like to be there. I like to be close to the product. And I’m listening to the discussion and it starts to become incredibly clear to me that the team is feeling defensive or blocked or angry. I couldn’t quite tell what it was that there’s another team doing some similar work. And by the way, if you’ve read any Jack Welch stuff, he actually had this tactic as a leader where he’d put two teams on the same problem and sort of get them to compete, these tiger teams. That was not Stripe’s tactic. I just want to be clear. We were not interested. We never had enough people. There’s no way we would put engineers on the same problem, believe me. And so it was mystifying.
And I think, by the way, I could hear it because I wasn’t in the room super close to the material. This wasn’t my part of the org. I hadn’t heard about the details of some of these projects until this meeting. I’m reading the document, I’m listening to them talk, and I just said, I said, “Can I just ask if there’s something we’re not talking about here?” And they’re all looking at me because I rarely poke in on certain moments with respect to what’s our product roadmap and what are we and is there something we’re not talking about? And everyone looks at me and I said, “I feel like you’re really concerned about this other team and what they’re building or what they’re up to. Are you concerned?” And initially, no, no, no. I mean it’s fine. It’s fine. They’ve got this thing they’re doing that — I said, “Well, do you think it’s the same thing? Is that what I’m hearing?”
And I just started to ask a bunch of questions of the leader of the discussion and I said, well, should that team be in the room right now? Should we have a meeting with both of you because it feels like there’s asymmetrical information and that you all don’t feel confident in what they’re building and that you’re either dependent on them or competing with them with what you’re building. And they were like maybe. Eventually became like, we don’t have the right people in the room to have a conversation about the problem. And so we sort of stopped it and said, let’s go do that to the credit of the rest of the people in the room. But as we left, one of the engineers who was sitting on the periphery walked up to me on the stairs and he was like, that was refreshing.
But why I’m bringing it up is to me that was a moment of leadership, which by the way, you don’t have to be a VP or a COO to do that. The leadership is to say, I am observing a thing that people are clearly not saying and are uncomfortable and actually seems to me like a bad practice happening. And I am going to just call it, I’m going to ask, is this going on? Am I seeing this correctly? And it’s going to change the whole trajectory of the meeting and the conversation and maybe of the team and their work. And there may be, I mean it did result in some de-duping ultimately. But I think that’s what I mean by say the thing. But the other thing could be —
Tim Ferriss: De-duping, meaning having people working on less similar overlapping diagrams of responsibilities.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Exactly. And I think really what it was is they both had a part of their team that was doing the same thing and they were feeling dependent on each other because it was almost like a yin yang and they didn’t have the whole picture. And I was like, all right, someone needs to have the whole thing under their control because it didn’t feel so it was almost duplicate plus dependency, which is sort of worse.
Tim Ferriss: Sounds like a recipe for plus lots of headache.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Exactly. But there’s also Tim, I’m sure you can picture an example in a personal situation where —
Tim Ferriss: There all the time
Claire Hughes Johnson: — you take a risk with a friend and you say, “Hey, have you told your husband that you feel that way?” So the detoxifying though, in any of these examples is in your mind you’re having a judgment. We’re always judging. The brain looks for shortcuts. We know this. It’s like I’m judging and I’m like, oh, I’m convinced that they’re pissed at this other team. Or I’m convinced my friend and her husband are having problems and I’m going to solve them. But you can’t come out to detoxify it, you have to sort of float above yourself and say, “It is not going to be productive for me to open my mouth and issue a judgment on another person or someone else’s work product.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, people take that really well.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah, exactly. People super don’t like that. So what can I do? What can I say? And my feeling is it’s usually a question that opens the aperture of the conversation but keeps them in a mode of curiosity, openness, how can I ask? And the problem and the art here, and this is why you have to practice it and it’s uncomfortable, is sometimes you say something too general. You’re like, “Is there something you’re not telling me?” That’s not going to work, that’s going to make them think, wait a minute, is there some paranoid thing and they don’t —
So it has to be more like “I’m hearing a concern.” You can use the words “I’m hearing a concern” about the work of this other team. “Say more. Are you concerned? Validate me?” And I’m all about hypotheses. I love management by hypothesis, which is like, I think this is happening. I’m going to name it. I’m going to name the hypothesis I have, and then I want you to validate it or by the way, fight with me. Say to me,”No, no, no, I have data to the contrary and I’m happy to revise my hypothesis.” But if you don’t state it, you’re not going to get anywhere.
Tim Ferriss: We’re going to come back to what people might perceive as uncomfortable conversations. And I want to ask later, we’re going to take a side quest for a minute about giving feedback to direct reports because a lot of people who listen to this or who are watching this have smaller teams. And my experience is that often people who are good at having these direct conversations in a personal context or a business context are sometimes compartmentalized in their capability in the sense that they’re very good. For instance, I think I’m better on the personal side than I am in the business side, specifically when it is team members of mine, employees.
If it’s with contractors or joint venture partners, I can do that. For whatever reason, I think it’s probably, we could also do years of psychotherapy on this, but a fear of someone, say, abruptly quitting or something if I don’t deliver the message properly, whereas I’m not worried about my friend quitting our friendship. They might get pissed and put me on ice for a week and give you the silent treatment, but it’s not going to be a forever thing. So I want to come back to that. But before we go there, I want to come back for a second to Fred Kofman and victim versus player. Can you explain what this is?
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah, I mean, I love this one because I think it’s so simplifying and clarifying really about are you managing someone or interacting with someone who has agency, takes responsibility. And Fred, when he introduces this framework, tells the story of how young children, and I think he has six or seven children by the way, but how young children when something has happened that they know is bad will not take responsibility. So they will say things like, “The coat is at school,” so not, “I left my coat at school” or “The toy…”
Tim Ferriss: Things have happened.
Claire Hughes Johnson: “The toy is broken.” You’re like, “Well, did you break it?” So he has this really disarming way of introducing this concept, which is we’re all laughing. It’s like you and I, we’re like, “Ha, ha, the toy is broken.” But then he’s like,”Okay, now let’s talk about if one of your direct reports came to you and said the report was not written and you’re like the report that you were meant to write?” But how it actually manifests is, I mean, yeah, you’re supposed to write some report up or some summary of a meeting and you say, “Oh, tell me where that is.”
And the player says, “Completely my fault. I had planned to get it to you by five o’clock yesterday. I prioritized this emergency that came up, didn’t tell you. My bad. Can we renegotiate? Can I get it to you at five o’clock today?” And you’re like, “Fine. I wish you’d told me that you weren’t going to get it.” But here’s what the victim says, “Let me tell you about that report. Lucy owes me her notes and I can’t finish it without Lucy. And Lucy is super slow at getting her notes. And I’m sorry, I don’t know when I’m going to get it.” But that actually is pretty common. People are like, “Well, it’s this other person that I’m depending on, and therefore I have no responsibility,” and they’re a victim and they’re going to play the victim. And I think that’s a very hard person to coach
Tim Ferriss: How much do you have to select that in your hiring process versus coach people from one side to the other? Have you had much success or seen much success in moving people from the victim side to the player side? And that’s a bit of a leading question by my tone, I guess I suspect there are a lot of instances where that’s hard. But in the success cases, what does that coaching process look like?
Claire Hughes Johnson: I’ve seen both. I feel like with people who are earlier in their career, “I’m all growth mindset,” but they’re a little more moldable. And you can actually coach people out of this as a way of operating. If they’re later in their career, it’s a little more ingrained and it’s quite hard, especially because they tend to not be aware of it because they’ve somehow been successful operating in that mode. And so they’re kind of like, “What are you saying?” You see leaders and how they behave, Tim, is they say, “Well, if it’s not under my direct control, then I’m not responsible.” And so they become empire builders and some organizations let them get away with it. They’re like, “Sure, you can have all the infrastructure teams then, and then I’ll hold you accountable.” It becomes this weird failing upward problem where people say, “Well, if I can control it, I’ll take responsibility.”
Tim Ferriss: If it’s within my house, then I’ll take responsibility. So people satisfy that checkbox by giving them more and more resources. What a nightmare.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Exactly. And it becomes this weird expanded scope of this person who actually doesn’t take responsibility. It’s a pattern I’ve seen. For people earlier in their career, the easiest coaching move you do, which I’m sure you’ve heard or someone’s done it to you, I’ve certainly had it done to me, you say to them, they’re saying, “Lucy didn’t send me her notes.” And you’re saying, “What could you have done differently?” And you have to let uncomfortable silence then. And some people will then will say, “What do you mean?” You’re like, “Oh, my gosh.” But some people will say, “Well, I guess I could have helped Lucy write the notes.” So what I try to do is stay in the discomfort, which is hard, and just sort of let’s list out a few things you could have done differently and not be judgmental, not judge the things. Just say what it was. So you could have helped Lucy write the notes. You could have set a deadline with her that was ahead of your deadline.
Tim Ferriss: I was going to say, set deadline in Asana where people can actually see it.
Claire Hughes Johnson: You could use a productivity tool where you could see. I love those tools because that’s sunshine. Sunshine is a great disinfectant, Tim. If everybody can see that Lucy has not done her action item, that is going to help Lucy be more accountable. But the point is, you come up with this list and the person I often is like, “Wow, wow, you’re right.” Really, what they’re going to have to admit to you is they’re being a little lazy. They’re not helping others do the work. They’re not a good collaborator. And so you say, and that’s what I sometimes do with someone who’s like, if this is a pattern, I say, “I see this pattern. Do you see this pattern where you’re waiting for other people all the time? Tell me more about why you think that’s happening. Why are the people not delivering for you?”
And the question is either it’s because they haven’t figured out how to do action items or accountability or be clear about deadlines or there’s someone people don’t like to work with. And so you’re going, I always call it going meta. You’re looking from the balcony at the situation, which is a term from adaptive leadership. Are you on the balcony or are you on the dance floor? And if you’re on the balcony, you try to get the person up there with you and say, why do you have this pattern of people not helping you get your work done? And then I think of it as going to the basement. I’m very visual person. I’m like, so we look down and if they acknowledge it, they say, “Yeah, I guess I see that.” And I say, “Well, let’s talk about a few examples.” And we come up with some examples and then we go down and we’re in the scenario and I say, let’s do the five whys. I mean, everyone loves the five whys.
I’m like, “Why do you think Lucy didn’t send you the notes?” “Well, she’s not good at deadlines.” And then this is a wonderful expression that I learned from some coach I had a million years ago. “Be that as it may,” which is not normal English language, but I don’t know it worked. Sort of, “Be that as it may, okay, maybe Lucy’s terrible at deadlines, but why else?” “Well, I didn’t ask her to get a specific time.” “Okay, so maybe there’s a thing. Why else?” And you’re sort of pushing them. And sometimes, not every time, they’ll sort of say, “Well, I don’t know. Lucy and I don’t work that well together.” And you’re like, “Oh, say more about that. What do you think’s going on?” And of course, by the way, your left-hand column, Tim, is it’s because Lucy doesn’t like you because you blame her for all of your missed deadlines. But I can’t say that because that person is going to go from “learning” to “barely in learning mode.” I’m trying to bring them along with me and they’re going to just shut down.
And by the way, they may never admit that Lucy doesn’t like them because they blame her for missed deadlines, but they’re going to realize that their manager, who’s me, is not letting them off the hook. And if they can’t get into an agency, a player mindset, I’m a responsible party for my work and others, then they are going to be off my team. If I can’t coach them out of it, to your point, there’s two gaps that I think are really hard. One is people who can’t stop being victims, and the other gap is, I call it self-awareness gap, where they think they are the best in the world.
I once worked with this BD person who was like, “I can negotiate a deal better than anyone.” And first of all, talk about not being in a learning mindset. I’m like, “Do you not think we should get any outside advice? Do you not?” I’m exaggerating a little bit, but really unaware that they had any potential blind spot or had never done a deal like this deal. And I’m like, “How are we going to close this awareness gap? Because the people around you are saying you are not the best person to negotiate this deal, and I’m trying to hand it to someone else and you’re like, ‘What? You have no one better than me.’ And that’s a very hard gap to close.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally. And I promise we are going to spend some time on self-awareness. The book I’ve probably gifted most to my friends and house guests and so on in the last few years is actually a very short book called Awareness by Anthony de Mello, which is outstanding. I need to read it again. I read it probably once or twice a year. So we are going to spend that some time there. I’m kind of tiptoeing around the edges of the dance floor as it were, and tiptoeing and side stepping on the balcony because I want to paint a picture of you also as a person, not just the concepts. So we are going to spend some time there. I’d also, just as a side note, if you decide to write another book, I think The Toy is Broken as a headline, as the title, and then the subtitle could be A High Performer’s Guide to Taking Responsibility. Oh, my God, so good. The Toy is Broken.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Tim, you’re hired for my marketing team. I’ve got to tell you, we’re not always the best at naming things, that’s right. So you’re invited.
Tim Ferriss: That’s the one thing that I’m good at.
Claire Hughes Johnson: You’re on the team. Congratulations.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you. Thank you. That’s a hell of a team I’m in. I’m so tired of being — my boss sucks. Oh, wait, I’m my boss.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Oh, you’re the boss.
Tim Ferriss: It’s terrible, terrible. You said you don’t recommend a lot of business books and I am going to come back to Sheryl and Axialent in a little bit, but you don’t recommend a lot of business books. Sometimes you read the introduction and you’re like, that’s enough. Thank you. Let’s talk about a non-business book, and that book is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. What is your history with this book and why do you recommend it?
Claire Hughes Johnson: I love great literature. I think that’s how I grew up with my parents are both teachers. My father was a high school English department chair and teacher and baseball coach, by the way. He would probably say he was a baseball coach and then he would say, and a teacher. My mom was a college professor for a long time. And I wish more people loved literature because I think how do you understand the human condition literature is the best shortcut to that in your life. But I think there are some authors for someone who becomes a student of literature that sort of change their worldview about really what’s possible with writing. So not just the book changes how they feel and think, but actually the process.
It’s sort of like when you see a product, I think you love innovative products. When you see something that you’re like, that is going to change my life. And so I think that To the Lighthouse represents, I mean, Virginia Woolf is a writer that resonated for me. And I think if you understand, if you’ve also studied history and you think, okay, she’s writing some stuff in the early 1900s, 1920s, there’s not a lot of women publishing a lot in that time in Britain. She gets herself into this writers collective with men and women. She also has relationships with men and women. She’s a pretty avant-garde person. But if you read A Room of One’s Own, it’s basically one of the earliest feminist manifestos that exist. And this is where I think Tim, you’re like me. I love people who are polymaths. You’re like, not just this amazing novelist, thank you, Virginia Woolf, but you’re also writing just your thoughts on things like women should have a room of their own, but actually figuratively, not just literally.
And I think that she’s fascinating. Her life is fascinating, and I want to acknowledge not all of her personal views are great on some things as that happens. I worry that we started to not study certain artists because they’ve said some things or done some things, which I would disagree with. I think people think she was an antisemite. And it does appear that she said some very anti-semitic things and some of her writing, I still think you should study Virginia Woolf, and I will own that as my position on her. But I think To the Lighthouse, most people would say, is her most important novel. I will be honest with you and say when I wrote my thesis in college, I was going to write it on To the Lighthouse, and then I actually decided to write it on Mrs. Dalloway, which is another one of her novels because I love the parallels from Mrs. Dalloway with a book called The Passion by Jeanette Winterson.
So Jeanette Winterson is a female British writer, more in the modern era who had broken through with a memoir called Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. And then had published this book, The Passion, and then a book called Sexing the Cherry, and she’s published now several books, but Jeanette Winterson I think is a descendant, in my opinion, of Virginia Woolf. And I was like, I’m going to examine these two novels. And I didn’t choose To the Lighthouse. And To the Lighthouse is not an easy read, and I want to own that also. Mrs. Dalloway, much more digestible, shorter book. It has some repetition in it, some beautiful rhythm in the writing where you’re like, oh, and I’m coming back around in this circular way to the way the story sort of moves you. To the Lighthouse is like a dream state. You feel like you’re in a dream state. You’re like the point of view are shifting. Who’s the real narrator here? What is the story? You’re not being driven by your classic plot or character driven story. It is much more internal.
Tim Ferriss: It’s like John Wick in some sense. I’m kidding. I’m kidding.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I feel like the plot of John Wick is pretty clear. “I am going to take vengeance. Excuse me, now, I’m going to come out of retirement and kill everyone.”
Tim Ferriss: I agree.
Claire Hughes Johnson: By the way, I’ll be —
Tim Ferriss: Great work of art.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I’ll be the first one to tell you, I read a lot of mysteries and thrillers, and I like movies like that actually, so I’m very multidimensional. But I think To the Lighthouse, you find something new every time you read it. You think about life, death, the human condition, what is love, what is family? What does it mean to connect with other human beings? And there’s something about the way the writing works. I mean, it’s set in this island in Scotland, and there’s a lighthouse and they go out in the boat. You literally feel like you’re surfing in a boat. That feeling when you’re like, I’m not really connected to firm land, but I’m in this inner set sanctum of people’s heads. So I think that it changed me because of the way it felt to read it. Frankly, the themes are much more sophisticated than my 19-year-old self probably could have handled.
You just said you should read Awareness again. I should go read To the Lighthouse again because now that I am a mother and a wife of a certain age, I’m like, this book is going to resonate a lot more for me. But what’s amazing is Virginia Woolf was never that. She didn’t have children. And she unfortunately did kill herself. She had a lot of demons and actually the way that she killed herself, brutal. She filled her pockets with rocks and drowned herself. And I think that a lot of artists are tortured, but the fact that she could project into this Mrs. Ramsay and this woman, this very maternal figure was a sign of true art artistry. Sorry that was very long, but it was.
Tim Ferriss: It’s why I have a long podcast.
So I’m not going to let it go. I’m going continue to chew on this bone a little bit. And for the record, I actually love John Wick, but I don’t want to dwell on John Wick. I was going to say, first, if you like dream-state evoking novels, the one that blew my mind, and nine out of 10 people hate this book, so it’s a very strong caveat, but it’s Little, Big by John Crowley, who’s actually a poet by training. It is so unbelievably good. You have to slog through the first 150 pages but, beyond that, it’s absolutely stunning.
So what are the reasons to read fiction aside from the, as I think you put it earlier, the insight into the human condition? If you were trying to get someone to take that first bite of the forbidden apple of fiction, are there any other points that you would make?
Claire Hughes Johnson: How do you build empathy? How do you understand everybody has a story? I mean, you’ve traveled a lot, Tim, but a lot of people you and I both know haven’t traveled the world, they haven’t been to that many countries. Do you want to go to another country? Find a great novel that’s been translated from that country, and read it, and you will understand that country in a way that no travel guide will ever give you, in my opinion. So I think it’s a very cheap way — and there’s also to build emotional intelligence.
I think I’ve worked now in tech companies for over 20 years, and when you sort of get to certain levels of responsibility with management and leadership, you could be technically the smartest person in the room, but if you have no emotional intelligence or dimensionality in contemplating emotional states, you are going to struggle. You are going to struggle to lead. And so when I say understand the human condition, I don’t just mean, “I’m reading a book and I understand, wow, that’s how it might feel to be in a divorce or that’s how it might feel to lose your child or — ” I’m saying, no, you yourself, as the reader, if the book is really good, start to feel the feelings. You start to feel like, “Oh, I lost a child.”
Emotional exercise is hard. It’s either happening to you, so you’re going through an emotional situation in your own life, which is hard, but doesn’t happen every day to most people, or you’re going to get emotional exercise from, in my experience, a lot of people get it from film.
They get it from video. They get it from video content. I worry we don’t — short form video gives you a dopamine hit, in my opinion, but not an actual deep story emotional resonant hit. We think we’re getting it when we see, “Oh, that dog fell through the ice, and then that guy rescued the dog,” and you’re sort of crying, and you’re so happy. But in a 30-second YouTube video, no, that’s not an emotional arc. That’s just like, “I like to see people rescue animals who are drowning.” But, no, I really — I think it’s a serious film. Maybe it’s John Wick. John Wick might be a way to detoxify your left-hand column.
Tim Ferriss: I almost cried. I said to my friend who’d seen it before, I was like, “If they touch that dog, I’m going to lose it.” And he just stayed silent. And I was like, “Oh, no, here it comes.” Anyway.
Claire Hughes Johnson: But anyway, point is, I think it’s emotional workout. Literature, great films.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. The other thing I would say is I think that fiction is often much more efficient and elegant in delivering truths than nonfiction. And that’s speaking as someone who was a militant nonfiction purist for decades. And I really wish I’d started earlier with reading very, very high-quality fiction.
Claire Hughes Johnson: What was your gateway fiction? What got you — I’m so glad to hear you’re a convert.
Tim Ferriss: Gateway fiction. I mean, I would say that early on I was an avid fiction reader. So as a kid there were books like The Neverending Story, and then later Dune, for instance. Science fiction. Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein, which were also very condensed thought experiments. This is part of the reason why I like sci-fi quite a lot. So for folks who are male, also female, but if they’re male tech on the spectrum over performers, I’ll usually steer them to, say, Ted Chiang short stories like Exhalation is his second collection. Then I stopped for a long time, because it was time to get serious, and follow the rules, and be a business guy, and so on and so forth. So I read all the nonfiction stuff.
And then I would say, later on, now that I’m reflecting on it, because I’m trying to pinpoint, and maybe it’s because you seeded me with the Argentina — I used to live in Argentina for about nine months in 2004, and in an effort, this is going to sound ridiculous to people who are familiar with his work, but I wanted to read fiction in an effort to get better at Spanish. I found side-by-side Jorge Luis Borges, which is incredibly challenging in Spanish, I will say right up front. But that ethereal magic realism, like magical realism, fever dream type of conjuring that he was able to accomplish was intoxicating to me, because it’s effectively mind control, right? Language, on some level, is mind control.
Claire Hughes Johnson: If you said to me, what’s the other To the Lighthouse, I would say One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, and my introduction to magical realism. And what’s interesting is you went to this, because a lot of guys I talk to, they’re like, “Neal Stephenson, Three-Body Problem.” It’s like there’s a sci-fi — Dune is always in there, Contact. Whatever, it depends on when they were born. But you get this sort of sci-fi, but what you just did I love, which is where else is there sci-fi? In a lot of Latin American literature. Isabel Allende, Borges, Márquez. And that’s where maybe the genders can meet, which is really emotional, gripping, multi-era stories, but really wild stuff, like dream state is happening. And you’re wondering, “Were they on drugs? What’s happening here?”
Tim Ferriss: Of course they were on drugs.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I hundred percent love that you went there, because I think it’s when you’re pushing the sci-fi into a different realm it’s magical realism.
Tim Ferriss: The most creative people I know, and this includes business, for sure. If they’re the most creative deal makers, they read and consume very widely. They’re not going to this huge buffet, and always eating the shredded carrots. Okay, fine. Shredded carrots, they’re healthy for you, easy to eat, I get it. But there’s a whole buffet, and they end up being able to connect disparate fields and ideas in a way that end up being, ultimately, incredibly interesting and sometimes very profitable.
And I would say — who was it? I’m going to blank on his name. He worked with Daniel Kahneman. I want to say it’s Amos Tversky, something like that. But he said something along the lines of researchers waste years not being able to waste hours. I’m butchering the quote, but it’s like if you feel so rushed that you cannot read a short fiction book, that is a symptom of a much larger problem, I would say. And so proving to yourself, creating the slack in the system to do that, I think, has its own benefits. All right. Fiction, fiction —
Claire Hughes Johnson: We believe in it.
Tim Ferriss: Fiction conversation, check.
Claire Hughes Johnson: We believe in it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, we believe. We believe. All right, so let’s come back to — actually, I’m going to take a further, not digression, because this is just a natural conversation, but we are going to come back to feedback for direct reports, but I feel like we need a smoother off-ramp. So what might make a nicer off-ramp from the fiction is something that is highly, highly, highly personal and nonfiction, and that is a working-with-me document. So I want to ask about questions that you might answer in a working-with-me document. You could explain what a working-with-me document is. And there are a number that come to mind that I have in front of me here, but perhaps you could just give a little bit of context on what a working-with-me document is, and how it is helpful.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Sure. A working-with-me document is, basically, trying to write your own user manual. And I don’t think you have to be a people manager, but I’ve come to believe it’s a best practice, if you are going to be managing people, to do your best to write a user manual to working with you. The idea came to me — actually, I was moderating a panel at Google. We had done this great — Google had then evolved to a point where it was trying to celebrate management. So we’d done this great manager award, and I was the moderator interviewing the great managers that we’d selected across several teams in front of this big room of people at Google. And I asked them, you ask, “What are some practices that you think have really benefited you as a manager?” And one of the panelists said, “Well, I copied this thing that Urs,” and this is Urs Hölzle who’s a long — many, many decades at Google, I think he’s only retiring now, who worked in infrastructure and building the servers, and a lot of what really makes your Google results come very quickly. You can thank Urs.
But anyway, and then at Google Cloud, a lot of work. But he wrote a user manual, and this person described it. And then they went on to say they wrote one, and they shared it with their team, and their team’s response. And I was like, “I should write one. Here I am moderating this great manager panel. I haven’t done this.” So like any good learner, I go back, and I sort of bang out this document. I mean, this is the thing that’s the most interesting to me in this, maybe, anti-growth mindset. But this was probably, I don’t know, 2009, 2008, whatever it was, many years ago, I bang out this document and I call it The Unauthorized Guide, because I don’t work for me.
So I invited comment. I said, “For those who, actually, have had me as a manager, please tell me how on base I am or not.” And then I gave it, actually — I had the time, had this really amazing woman who had been a manager in my organization, and then she went on maternity leave, and came back, and asked to be my assistant. She said, “I want to change sort of — I think I could be kind of a chief of staff to you.” And she was very talented, and we got very close, and she worked for me for at least half my career at Google. And I was like, “Maeve, read this. Am I anywhere near, am I on base here?” And she was actually — she’s Irish, which is a theme, somehow, in my life. I really bond with the Irish. And she said, “Well, I feel like at the end you don’t even acknowledge that you like good craic.” And craic, which I’m saying wrong, in Irish is sort of fun joke humor.
She’s like, “Your meetings,” she said, “I’ve never been in a meeting with you where we didn’t laugh, at least once.” And that’s the kind of thing, by the way, that you don’t know, because you’re never not in a meeting with you. And so I was like, “Oh, that was super helpful,” but I feel embarrassed that I’m like — I said, “Am I saying I’m funny?” She’s like, “No, you like a good laugh. You’re not trying to…” It’s true. I’m not particularly that funny, but I really enjoy humor. Anyway, so we added a section at the end. But she said, “No, I think this is pretty good. I think you should send it to the team, and see what they think.” But what’s amazing, Tim, is that document has not changed markedly from my —
Tim Ferriss: Since 2009 or whatever it was.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Since 2009, it has not changed very much, and we can decide how we feel about that. But I think it’s a great exercise in self-awareness. It’s a great exercise in also sort of thinking about, okay, when I have to make a decision, so to your point, what kind of content is there? Some of it’s very tactical. It’s like, “How do I like — what communication channels work best for me?” So how do use our one-on-one versus send me a Slack versus a text versus call me. In today’s world, I literally have people that I work with — actually, I think you know, I work with Patrick and John Collison, the Stripe co-founders. They contacted me on every channel. How is it that you’re texting me, WhatsApping me, calling me, Slacking me, rarely emailing me. Actually, emailing is probably the least interesting channel to them. But anyway, so you give guidance. What are the best channels? How do use our one-on-one, but also things like how do I tend to make decisions?
So if you’re coming to me for a decision, here’s what you can expect. If it’s this kind of decision, how long will I need? What kind of data might I like? What’s my — I have a section in my doc, which is I tend to be intuitive. So I’ve taken a lot of different personality assessments, and I actually don’t really spike in a lot of areas, but I spike as highly intuitive, meaning you come to me with something, I intuitively have an opinion. I’m like, “Oh, I think this is going to be the right thing to do,” or, “I think.” I say I’m intuitive, and then I write dot dot dot. Don’t worry, I won’t jump to — but data-driven. So I’ll tell you my intuition, and then I’ll say to you, “Bring me data, so we either can validate it or you tell me your intuition, but let’s get some data, so I don’t just get out there and start operating without any basis.”
But I think that you’re trying to reflect that, but I think it’s important to reflect that. For example, in my first version, one thing that did change when my team read it was I said, “I’m not a…” By the way, every manager’s like, “I’m not a micromanager.” It’s like a common — everyone’s like, “Well, don’t worry, I’m not a micromanager.” Unfortunately, a lot of us are. And I said, “I’m not a micromanager. I will delegate. I will trust you, but if I am concerned, you’re going to know, and I’ll get more involved.” And so I thought I was being pretty honest. When I do get involved, we should have a conversation, because it means I’m having an issue with trust, which means I’m not sure I’m happy with the product.
So this guy who worked for me, he said, “I’m not sure that you’re accurate about this.” And I said, “Well, tell me, are you saying I’m a micromanager? And he said, “Well, there was this one thing,” and he named this project that I had delegated to him. And he’s like, “Then you proceeded to show up in every meeting, read every document, be in the spreadsheet.” And he’s like, “That, to me, felt pretty micromanaging.” I was like, “Yeah, I bet it did feel that way.” I said, “I did that because that project was the first time,” it was like a compensation, sales compensation scheme.
I was like, “That’s the first time I’d ever built one, and I was really wanting to learn.” He said, “Well, you never told me that.” So as far as he was concerned, I showed up in every thing this poor guy had scheduled, and he’s supposed to be leading it, he’s supposed to make a recommendation to me, and I’m reading all the same stuff, participating — I mean, looking back, I’m really embarrassed. I was like, “I can’t believe I didn’t tell you,” because I had full confidence in this — he was probably, by the way, better positioned than I was to build this thing. And I was counting on him, but then I went and undermined him.
And so that’s why — by the way, the working-with-me document’s also helpful is because if you have good relationships with people you work with, they will tell you, “Yeah, you think you act this way, but you really don’t.” So then I had to add a section about, “Sometimes when it feels like I’m micromanaging you, it’s because I’m trying to learn. The first time I’ve ever done a thing, you are going to see me hyper-involved, but what we should do is establish that ahead of time. And if I don’t, please call me on it.” But anyway, the point is, the working-with-me document became something I just shared with — I share today with anyone who starts to work with me closely.
And what happens in high-growth environments, like Google and Stripe, is your team changes a lot. There’s new people. People’s managers change. It’s hard. You don’t love that, but I’ve had people come to me and say, “You’re my fourth manager in a year.” So what are you trying to do? You’re trying to create a shortcut, because there’s anxiety when we first work with someone. Like, “Well, should I call you if I have some kind of crisis? When you’re at night, and Slack looks like you’re available, should I Slack you stuff or should I wait until the next morning?” You’re looking for guidance. You’re looking to read the person. I’m like, “Just tell them. Tell them how to work with you.” And then that reduces the anxiety. And ideally, they write their own manual, and then you’ve both sort of shortcut some of the get-to-know-you stuff, so you can just jump right into working together.
Tim Ferriss: This is something I wanted to explore, because jumping, and I suppose, to something you explore at some length in your book, which I definitely recommend people check out, and I underlined this a couple of times for myself, because I still feel like I have room to improve here. And that is strive to make implicit structures and beliefs explicit. Make the implicit explicit. And that shows up in so many different ways. It can manifest in so many different ways. And I want to stick with working-with-me document for a minute.
This first came to my attention, because I had Dustin Moskovitz on the podcast, from Facebook fame, and then certainly of Asana, and he shared his working-with-me document. And I’ve since seen a few versions of this, but I wanted to get your take on what might be worth adding to this list of questions. Here are a few. “What do I want to be involved in?” “When do I want to hear from you?” One, you already mentioned, “What are my preferred communication modes?” “What makes me impatient?” Are there other questions that you have found helpful to address or topic areas worth including, having seen these letters, having crafted your own working-with-me document?
Claire Hughes Johnson: My working-with-me document was published in Elad Gil’s book, High Growth Handbook, and it went a little bit viral. Viral for Claire, not for Tim Ferriss, but still, I was shocked at how many people that I’ve never met had seen it. And I also got some criticisms on the internet webs, on the interwebs, that it was very egotistical, in some way. It was sort of like, “Here’s how you make me happy.” Which I was like, “Okay, that’s a totally fair criticism, and not the intention.”
By the way, I’m pretty highly empathetic. I’m like, “I’m trying to reduce anxiety, and help people feel comfortable being honest with me.” Whatever. But I get it. It seems very self-absorbed. So one of the things that I’m reacting to is, the question, I guess, if I were going to phrase it as a question, it would be, “How do I help you make great decisions?” Or, “How do you like to make decisions?” But I think, in my document, I just sort of have headers like decision making, because I’m not telling — that’s why Urs called it “User Manual,” which is a very tech, an engineer is going to be like, “I’m going to write a user manual,” to me. I just called it, “Working with Me, Working with Claire.” There’s a section on what types of information do you like to see? Because that’s different than how do I want to be communicated with? And it’s different than when should I get in touch with you? Which is if there’s a crisis, get in touch with me.
But there’s something in mine where I talk about the fact that if someone on your team is having a major life event, I’d like to know about it. I’d like to send them a note. I’d like to say, “I’m sorry,” or celebrate their child. I think that what types of information do you like to have? I also get really explicit about things like email protocols mean different things to people, especially in different generations. I’m sure you’ve seen this.
But I used to work with someone who would send FYI and really, really feel strongly that you need to process that information and have a response. Whereas for me, I’m like, if you send me FYI —
Tim Ferriss: That means no response.
Claire Hughes Johnson: That means, well, it means —
Tim Ferriss: For me, anyway.
Claire Hughes Johnson: — I can read it later and it’s interesting, but I don’t need to respond. I’m like, “I can’t believe this.” I think you asked your guests a question of if you were going to have a billboard. I think the fight for me in my billboard would be is it, “Make the implicit explicit,” or is it, “Undermine the superstructure from within?” I’m not sure, but one of those is my billboard.
Tim Ferriss: I’d think so. The first one.
Claire Hughes Johnson: But the first one —
Tim Ferriss: I think I get the first one.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Making the implicit explicit is so valuable to — by the way, a lot of people are like, “I love that your book is so humanistic about people and how to care for…” I was like, “Folks, my book is about getting results.” I do appreciate other humans and I love working with them even though people, sometimes Patrick calls and I would be like, “Oh, my gosh, this is the hardest problem.” And we’d go, “Oh, if there were no humans involved, it would be so much easier,” right?
But the point is I love humans and the human condition, but I really am talking about how do you get results? And how do you get results? You get super clear and transparent about anything implicit — you make it explicit and you’re clear. This is a process. We’re going to go through it to get to this outcome. And what is the outcome we want? Make it explicit.
I mean, Tim, you I think are the master of this. What are we measuring? Why are we measuring it? How will we know if we won.I would add to that and what process will we go through together to get there so that no one is guessing or reading the tea leaves or wondering why another team is doing the same project. Put it all on the table so that we can get to the end faster and frankly more inclusively.
And why do I care about inclusion? Yes, inclusion is a good thing for people to feel better and included, but actually because if you’ve hired a bunch of smart people and yet they don’t feel included, they will not share their opinion. And the reason you hired them is because they’re smart people who bring diverse opinions, and if they won’t say them, then you’re not really benefiting from all that work hiring them, because you want a better outcome.
This is all about results, but I think people, it’s a little windy to get there sometimes until you make it explicit.
Tim Ferriss: I wanted to piggyback off of your Irish pattern in life and recommend a short film that I think won an Oscar. I might be making that up, but it won some slew of fancy awards and I watched it last night called An Irish Goodbye. It’s about 22, 23 minutes long. You can find it on Vimeo. I think you might be able to watch it on YouTube as well.
It is hilarious and profound and outstanding. I think, based on the little, that I feel I’ve felt out with our fiction love fest, I think you would really enjoy this. It is one of the better short films I’ve ever seen. It’s really good. It’s really, really good.
Claire Hughes Johnson: All right.
Tim Ferriss: So An Irish Goodbye.
Claire Hughes Johnson: What is it, Little, Big and Irish Goodbye?
Tim Ferriss: Start with An Irish Goodbye because then you’ll be like, “Wow, Tim really recommends good stuff.” And then if you hate Little, Big, at least I’ll have some redemption preemptively.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Okay, all right, that’s fair. I’ll do it.
Tim Ferriss: That’s like the —
Claire Hughes Johnson: I’ll do it.
Tim Ferriss: — the amuse-bouche, before you try to chew on the fever dream.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I want to say also I’d love a good Irish goodbye. I used to find it a little offensive, but now I am like, “Gosh, there’s some real beauty in just disappearing.”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I do that all the time. I do it all the time. So email policies. I had a request from Kevin Kelly recently who’s been on the podcast and is a close friend. And then I asked him if I could help him with anything. We were having a conversation and he said, “Well, I do have one request,” and it’s not for him. It’s because he gets asked about it so much. He doesn’t have any issues with email, but he’s like, “I want you to ask every one of your guests about email policy/rules, systems, anything that they have ended up using that they have found helpful.”
And I will say in advance, my assumption is that almost, well, it’s not my assumption. I’ve also run into this. Even though this podcast has some of the top-performing people in the world of every discipline imaginable, they all claim to kind of suck at email. They’re behind and it’s hard. So I understand that. Being that as it may —
Claire Hughes Johnson: See, it’s a beautiful expression.
Tim Ferriss: Here we go.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Being that as it may.
Tim Ferriss: Be that as it may.
Claire Hughes Johnson: You are still going to have to answer this.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Are there any sort of email policies, systems, rules, implicit things that you make explicit that you found helpful?
Claire Hughes Johnson: I actually worked on Gmail right after it launched at Google, and you should think I would be a power email organizer and I’m okay, but I’m not great. But one thing that just stuck out of my mind as you brought this up is I had a good friend who was a executive at Genentech and she rose up with Genentech as it got big and she got more and more responsibility. She told me about this leadership training they put them in, Tim, that honestly, whenever I look at my inbox, I think of this training.
Where they gave them some 30 minutes, some window, they gave them an inbox and they were like, “You need to process all this and kind of do the right things,” right? And so in this inbox of 100 emails, whatever, they have 30 minutes. You have to find, there’s a massive legal issue, there’s an HR violation, but it’s not in the headline of the subject of the email.
Tim Ferriss: It sounds like an anxiety dream.
Claire Hughes Johnson: It’s like a bunch of bombs in these messages and you have to open them, skim them, decide, and you have to come back to it, right? I kind of was feeling like Japanese game show. I’m like, “Would this be a show that people might want to watch?” And I think there is a sector of people who might find that really interesting to watch. So sometimes I look at my inbox and I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I have 30 minutes and I need to find all of the legal time bombs.”
But one of the things that I think I’m very good at on email is there is a set of people in my both professional and personal life where they get opened immediately. I’ll open it and if it’s, by the way, I read FYI, I’ll read it later. But I really want to make sure, I mean, it’s easy. Some of these people, it’s easy. It’s like your kids, right? By the way, my kids are teenagers, they never email me. So that’s easy.
But certainly if you’re the COO of a company, even if you’re not the COO anymore, if the founders of Stripe emailed me directly, I’m going to open the email pretty fricking quickly, so it’s sort of like your boss. But I do think that some people have a methodology, which is either LIFO or FIFO, right? Last in, first out.
Tim Ferriss: Last in, first out.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And I think that that’s tempting. My husband does this a little bit. It bothers me. I’m like, “But you have cues,” which is who is it from, and is it group or is it in direct to you? And use those cues to prioritize. And so if you only have 30 minutes, you know where to start. So that’s one of the things, and it is a combination of the people and what’s being sent to you directly. So I think that’s a number one rule I have that I’m pretty actually good at.
So there’s certain people who feel I’m very responsive on email because I am very responsive to them. I’m not maybe responsive to everyone as consistently. So I think the other is this is more of a cheat, but you’re an investor I think, right? So I’ve invested in some companies and a lot of them send these investor newsletters or investor updates.
Tim Ferriss: Updates.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And this is one of my, and of course because I do have some Gmail skills, I label them. I know there’s a folder full of them, and I have every intention, Tim, that on Friday for two hours —
Tim Ferriss: That’s where it’s gone.
Claire Hughes Johnson: — I’m going to read those investor updates, okay? You know what? That is not correct. Sometimes when I’m on an airplane and I’m trapped, I open and start reading them, but I am not reading them in a timely fashion. And I’m sorry, all the founders I have invested in, I’m sorry. I’m not reading your investor updates in a timely fashion.
But what I’ve learned to do, and this goes back to making the implicit explicit and also to another rule I have, which is strive to set expectations with people. So now when I invest in a company, I say to them, I say, “Look, you may email me, I’ll give you my email.” I said, “I’ll give you my cell phone. I’m quite good on text, but please don’t abuse it. And if you want to WhatsApp me and whatever, either of those is going to work.”
And then I say to them, “I want you to know I really appreciate getting the investor updates. I will not read them in a timely fashion. I may not read them at all. If you need something from me directly, you need, ‘Help me interview this person,’ you should get in touch with me directly. Not at the end of an investor email that says, ‘Please help us hire some more data scientists.”
Tim Ferriss: Investor asks. Right.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And cognitive load-wise, I’m like, “Phew.”
Tim Ferriss: It’s stressful for you.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I have been feeling so much guilt about not reading their — and by the way, they spend so much time on them and it’s terrible sometimes, but I no longer feel guilt. I have told them, “You must contact me directly.”
Tim Ferriss: Set expectations.
Claire Hughes Johnson: But this is actually a management lesson. This goes back to the user manual or the “Working with Claire” guide. Why not tell people, “I have this habit of ignoring this kind of thing, and if you need my attention, please, you have my permission. Please use it. Please text me even.” I mean for these founders, they have my phone number. I’m like, “If you need me, you can call me,” right? But it’s sort of a human lesson we learn over and over again, which is we’re dying inside that we’re disappointing someone. And I’m like, “No, just renegotiate the terms of what expectations they should have of you.”
Tim Ferriss: How else does this renegotiating show up? This has become, it’s embarrassing to say, but I’d say maybe in the last two years has become such a revelation for me in a sense, because I always thought about negotiating as the thing you did in the beginning, and I got, I think, pretty good at that.
At times though, I would have, who knows, maybe I’ve had two glasses of wine or I had too little sleep or whatever, and I would agree to these things. Then later I’d look at my calendar and my blood pressure would go up 30 points because I felt trapped by these commitments that I made when I was compromised or rushed or lazy, fill in the blank. And this renegotiating has become an invisible option, made visible for me in the last two years.
Could you talk a little bit more about how you have used that in your life, personal or professional, how that shows up? Examples would be really helpful here so people can really get a grasp on it.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I mean I can really, I’m having almost a physical reaction to relating to you about this calendar. It’s like your past self. I used to say, “Oh, my gosh, I just mailed myself a letter bomb.” You’re like, “Later I’m going to.” So one is of course, we all strive to improve, which is do not make a decision in the moment about a timer or a commitment of resources or time without trying to project your future self.
But of course we all do because you’re right, we’re rushed. We’re trying to be responsive. We’re trying to move through our inbox. By the way, because we’ve only got 30 minutes, or we might fail the corporate training test.
Tim Ferriss: Or the Japanese TV show. I don’t want to come in last.
Claire Hughes Johnson: So one thing is trying to be better about projecting. And I also had a friend who’s a very kind of spiritually in touch person, and she said, “When something is requested of you,” she said, “you need to sometimes listen for the quiet no.”
Tim Ferriss: Can you say that one more time?
Claire Hughes Johnson: So she said, “When something’s requested of you, sometimes your reaction is, ‘Wow, yes.’” Right, you’ve had this?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I mean, hey, Tim Ferriss asked me to be on his podcast. I was like, “Yes,” emphatically. That is something I want to do. That is easy. My past and future selves are very happy to be here. But often we get a request, you have this experience and you’re looking at it and she says, “Listen for the quiet no. Because we often feel like we have to say yes.” And her trick is, and I know this wasn’t the question you asked me, which I will answer, but her trick is —
Tim Ferriss: These are really closely related.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Do not —
Tim Ferriss: I’m so interested in this.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I think they are. Do not respond immediately because we often feel, I mean if you’re someone who prides yourself on being decisive and responsive and empathetic as I do, I feel like, “Well, they asked me to be on this panel at this important conference or whatever.” I’ve learned that my response in fact should be, “When do you need to know whether or not I can be on this panel?” Or I’ll even say, “I need two weeks to get back to you about whether I can be on this panel.”
Because if I don’t give myself some space, I will do yes instead of the quiet no. Because I didn’t give myself time to really think about, “Is this my priority? Should I spend my time? Oh, my gosh, I have to fly to the city.” You have to really think. So I think when you are renegotiating, so I’m proud of you that you found this as a skill. And by the way, I have the same problem.
I had a delayed travel earlier this week and I was looking at my next day and I was thinking, “Well, I am going to get home, but I’m going to get home at now 2:00 in the morning.” And then I looked at it and I was like, “I should not even be doing that stuff.” I was like, “Why did I even agree to go into Boston and have lunch with this person and then talk to this other person when I’ll be…” And so I was like, “I am going to renegotiate those commitments. I don’t even have to say that I was delayed.”
So it’s a good skill, but what I look for is a pattern. A pattern of why am I renegotiating this stuff? It means I’m not making the right decision in the first place so I listen for the quiet no.
But if I find myself renegotiating, it is often about commitments I’ve made. Commitments, especially of time, is the main thing. My mom was a very talented, apparently mathematician in college and my mom went to Harvard, well, Radcliffe then. But I think it was pretty rare for a woman to be a star in the math department.
Tim Ferriss: Super rare.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And she decided to go get her PhD in history and to major in history. And I said, “Why did you switch? Why did you make the switch?” And she said, “I realized that there is a trade-off that most people find themselves making between money and time.” And she said, “I knew that if I prioritized math, it would likely lead to a more lucrative career.”
By the way, my mom was out there. She was going to work and she did, and she was going to have kids and work, but she was like, “It would lead to a more lucrative career, but I would not have time. So I decided to become…” She became an academic. She got her PhD. She became a professor. And why? Because professors have more control over their time. They have the summers off and they have time to think and write. And that’s what she knew she wanted.
Which, by the way, is pretty aware for a 19- or 20-year-old —
Tim Ferriss: That’s incredible.
Claire Hughes Johnson: — to realize you’re going to trade money on time.
Tim Ferriss: Wow.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And I think it’s Peter Thiel who says, “People don’t value their time highly enough.” They just don’t get every hour is costing you something. And I’ve taken me so long to come to this point where I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I just threw away and said, ‘Sure, I’ll meet with you to give you advice about that thing.’” And I’m like, “Oh.” So I’ve become less responsive on email because I am trying to stop myself from, I don’t know, mortgaging my time.
You may or may not have had the same experience, but all right, here’s an example. You’re looking for concrete. I have a woman who I highly value personally in my life. She’s a founder and she asked me to be on her board. I had made a rule. By the way, to stop myself from saying yes to stuff, I make rules. So I made a rule. I was like, “No more boards.” I also have a rule about travel right now.
My daughter’s going to college soon. No more travel unless it meets these criteria because I want to be home. Of course, she doesn’t want to hang out with me, but I want to hang out with her.
Tim Ferriss: What are the criteria? Just out of curiosity?
Claire Hughes Johnson: It could be really important —
Tim Ferriss: It could be just a few examples.
Claire Hughes Johnson: No, really important to Stripe. I still actually work part-time for Stripe, and they get bids on my time. And if Stripe said, “The most important thing you can do for Stripe is go to…” this happened to me recently, “…go to Helsinki, to Slush to this conference.” I was like, “Fine, I will do it. I will go to Helsinki for Stripe,” right? And by the way, I had a great time. I met a great number of founders and it was actually a blast.
So, is it important to Stripe? Is it a personal connection that is meaningful to me that is asking of my time, treasure, talents? My criteria is not to say yes to default, but it is to number one, is there a way I could do it that is less friction? As in, am I flying to California anyway, therefore I can do that commitment if I bundle it? So, can I control when it is? If I can control when it is and it’s a personal connection that’s meaningful to me, I will make it happen, but it will not happen quickly.
But if it’s not something I can control where and when it is, then I have a subset of criteria of, can I do? But I often will say, maybe it’s a conference, “Can I do this next year and get back to you later so I can actually think for a minute?” A lot of it is buying time. But anyway, I have these rules about things because it stops me. So I said to her, I said, “I have made a commitment to myself that I will not join another board.”
And because she’s a talented founder, she’s persistent and she said, “Why don’t you just come and be an observer? Why don’t you just come to…”
Tim Ferriss: Tricky.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I know, I know. “Come to the board meeting.” And then she told me why she really needed help in this particular moment. And there was a situation where having someone who was a friendly, who was neutral in the room was going to be valuable. So I said, “Okay, I will come, but I really want to set your expectations.” I was like, “This is not going to reel me in. I’m not going to join the board.” And I did go and she actually convinced someone else.
The two of us went and we actually I think helped her through a particular moment by being sort of board participants. But then she said, “I’d like you to come to every, of course, every board meeting.” And I said, “I don’t think I can commit to that, but I can try when it’s virtual and if it’s in person, I’m pretty sure I won’t, but you can invite me.” I went to a couple. I did pretty well. And then I started to look at my calendar and I was like, “I can’t do this. I can’t even take three, four hours. I can’t.” So I needed to renegotiate it.
There’s a quote that I have in my book that people find I think the most compelling line in the book, and I keep having to remind them, “It is not my line.”
Tim Ferriss: I know this problem where I’m like —
Claire Hughes Johnson: Do you know this problem?
Tim Ferriss: — “No, no, no. Don’t attribute it to me. That was Mark Twain or whatever.”
Claire Hughes Johnson: Exactly. Exactly. So the line is from Ron Heifetz or Marty Linsky. These are the adaptive leadership guys who do the balcony and the dance floor analogy. It is, “Leadership is disappointing people at a rate that they can absorb.”
Tim Ferriss: I had that line underlined. It’s very catchy.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Because it really makes you think, and it’s kind of dark too. You’re like, “Wow.”
Tim Ferriss: What does that mean in concrete terms? And then I’m not going to let go of the renegotiating because I’m going to come back to that. I want to ask you about phrasing and wording that you use —
Claire Hughes Johnson: Okay, perfect.
Tim Ferriss: — but let’s talk about leadership and disappointing people.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Disappointing people. Well, I think one of the ways that leaders disappoint people is their time. You don’t have unlimited time. You’re the CEO of a company, right? There’s no way you’re going to be at all the things or do all the things. But the key is how do you create enough leadership buy in that people understand? And also you get a little bit of forgiveness when you’re the CEO, I think.
But leadership is disappointing people at a rate they can absorb to me is about management is very knowable. How do I get from point A to point B? What people do I need? How many? What’s the scope? How are we going to measure it? Here’s the project plan, here’s the milestones, here’s the talents I need and now I’m going to deploy and delegate.
I think leadership is very unknowable because it is essentially having a vision, an idea, a goal that you haven’t even fully understood yourself, right, often. It’s like, “We’re going to climb this mountain that no one has ever climbed before, by the way.” And you have to be really convincing to build followership. You’re painting a picture of the top of that mountain man, and it is awesome. The climb is going to be really challenging, but really rewarding.
You are going to get on that journey with those people and you are going to be wrong about a lot of what you just said. Right? “No, actually it wasn’t as easy up the south face as we thought it was. Yes, we did actually need special equipment. No, we didn’t.” I mean, come on. You don’t even know how you’re going to get up there. I mean, the analogy that’s more concrete that I use is, “I came into Stripe and look, it’s a product that has people’s money and you need to have good support experiences when something is wrong with any kind of payment.”
“I’m expecting money, I’m trying to take money, I’m moving money.” There’s a high expectation. And Patrick is like, “We need to build 24/7 global support.” We had really good ambitions. And by the way, I want to be clear, one of the things that Stripe has as a value is to be users first. It is always our most important operating principle. It is actually deeply in the culture of the company, so much so, Tim, that when the support team would get behind, the entire company would stop and answer support emails.
So this was becoming an existential problem because we had to do engineering work and other work to build the company, but we were ending up on Fridays, before the weekend, because you want to get back to people quickly, answering support tickets. By the way, you hit product market fit, you get traction. This is a super normal problem, but it is not great because the product is people’s money.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a quality problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And so Patrick is like, “Look, we need to have this 24/7.” And I had to get up as a leader and say, “I will build this.” And I had built similar things for Google, so I wasn’t completely describing a mountain I’d never seen, but I certainly didn’t join Google when it was only 160 people with 21 support people. And I was like, “We are now going to do a set of things to solve this.” It took me a few years and it’s not perfect. And it involved hiring very talented people.
I don’t get credit for what we built, but I still look back on that and I say, “I can’t believe I declared that I would get it done.” I didn’t have a plan because I’m more of a manager. I’m more of like, “I need to have a clear plan on how I’m going to get this done.” And instead I was like, “Yep, we’re going to have it.” Public announcement. I mean Patrick kind of pushed me there, but I was like, “This is uncomfortable.”
And I’ll tell you, I did disappoint. Did I deliver it by the end of that year? Oh, no, Tim. I did not deliver it by the end of that first year. Let’s not kid ourselves. I disappointed. But I did figure out a way to do it and I think people followed me. They kept following me. They kept believing we were going to do it, which is some combination of me being authentic, I think. Me being honest about where we were, me having a plan eventually, me demonstrating that it mattered, whatever.
So I think that’s what it means is you will not live up to everything you said, all the expectations of you with your time, with your ideas. We’re all humans. We’re not perfect. And we’re not fortune tellers. I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: We’re not fortune tellers. So this ties into the renegotiating actually pretty well because there are many different species of renegotiating. One was, you gave an example very early on in the conversation when Lucy was getting thrown under the bus, “The dog ate my homework” situation. And then we segued from that to the player versus victim.
The player would say, “You know what? You’re right. I committed to get this to you by 5:00 p.m. I didn’t. And because this emergency popped up and I dah dah, dah, I didn’t let you know. I should have let you know. How about 5:00 p.m. tomorrow?” Or whatever the example was.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Renegotiation.
Tim Ferriss: Renegotiation. So in this particular example, when it becomes clear to you that by whatever deadline had been agreed you were not going to be able to deliver what you’re going to hope to deliver, what does that conversation look like? I mean, it’s not exactly semiotics, but I know you like language —
Claire Hughes Johnson: I do.
Tim Ferriss: — and you consume a lot of language. So what is the language that you use to have that conversation, whether it’s verbal or in email?
Claire Hughes Johnson: I think you made the connection and then you didn’t finish making a connection. But it is so easy to sound like a victim, right, when you are facing this kind of a situation. And if you’re someone who prides themselves on being a player, on taking ownership and you’ve made this commitment and you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, there is no way I’m either coming to that meeting or delivering 24/7 global support in six months.” So, what does it look like?
I think what it looks like, the first thing I did that was probably the smartest thing I did when I joined Stripe was I listened. And my first 90 days I talked to everybody and I heard sort of, “Here’s the priorities, here’s what people need, here’s what might need my attention.” And then I sat down with Patrick and I said, “I’m hearing these four things…” one of them was the support thing, by the way, “…that really need my attention and I am going to rank them.”
“And then I want you to see my ranking and I want to agree on my level of priority,” I said, “because I can’t make meaningful progress on four things at once. I can maybe keep,” and I actually predicted in that moment, I said — because we had to build sales, we had to build recruiting. We had some internal operational stuff that needed to be fixed. And then we had this support sort of smoldering fire. And I said, “I think I actually need to build sales and recruiting ahead of fixing support, but I predict support is going to implode within the next six months.”
Tim Ferriss: And at that point you were COO, is that right?
Claire Hughes Johnson: I was COO. I was actually hired as chief of business operations and then we just swapped titles with someone else. But it’s a long story. But yes, I was basically COO. And remember, we’re users first. This was painful because we were also not getting back to sales leads though, Tim. I’m also here to build some revenue. I’m here to build to go to market, and I’m here to deliver some revenue for this company. And we have this other thing where we’re not getting back to our prospects.
So it was a very Sophie’s Choice kind of moment, honestly. Oh, and then we couldn’t hire people to build the company so we couldn’t get back to sales leads. This is normal by the way. This happens, and especially for people like me coming into that kind of opportunity. But what I loved about that conversation was Patrick was one, first of all, supportive. He was like, “Great. This is good for us to talk out now.” And then he had to admit, he’s like, “I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I agree, you’re not going to fix support in the first six months.”
Really. We made an agreement. And then by the way, Tim, four months in, complete explosion. And I was thinking in my head, “Thank goodness.” This goes back to expectation setting. I’m like, thank goodness I said out loud that I thought it was going to explode. And then I mean, by the way, it’s still terrible. I was still sad. I was like, oh, my gosh. I mean I had to go then put it at the top of the priority list basically. But I had at least four months to build some other things.
The point is when you’re renegotiating, so one is try to set the priorities, align on them, and set expectations ahead of time. Even if you haven’t done that, you’re going to reach a moment where you’re like, there’s no way we’re getting to the top of this mountain. And so, what you try to do is not come up and make a bunch of excuses.
What I think I did in those moments, and we had written public goals in the company, we had plans. And I just want to be clear, none of the plans — this is where when you’re working with founders, maybe this is a side, what do you call them? Side quests. This is a little bit of a side quest.
Tim Ferriss: Love side quests.
Claire Hughes Johnson: But when you’re working with founders, people describe this reality distortion experience, which often is more that they have a version of reality and they’re like, “No, no, no, we can ship the iPhone in five minutes,” or whatever. And everyone’s like, “Yes, Steve, yes we can.” Right?
There’s another version of reality distortion I find, which is you can fix that thing in five minutes. I mean it’s now a joke between Patrick and I because he’ll be like, “Yeah, we could just code that up.” And I say, “In five minutes?” I’m like, “It’s not five minutes.” But so, we had a consistent conflict where I would say to him, “No, that mountain is not going to be climbed by the end of this year.” I never actually said I was going to build that thing by the end of the year, and he refused to hear it. He was like, “No, it really needs to be the goal. This actually needs to be the goal.”
Tim Ferriss: “Be that as it may, Claire.”
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. “Be that as it may, Claire, I’m making it your goal.” And I was like, “Okay. Under duress, I am going to take this goal and try to put some language in it that gives…” I mean, I’m going to get a red. Whatever on your — I mean that doesn’t feel good. This is the other thing. It’s beneficial to walk into a situation like that after some amount of career success so that you have some amount of self-actualization.
I was like, luckily my whole identity is not tied up in this goal because I would’ve been destroyed. I would’ve really lost confidence. By the way, a lot of leaders you hire into a startup environment end up losing confidence just because you’re getting pummeled, totally pummeled. And you need to be like, no, no, no. I have identity outside of the success of this moment.
But I was like, all right, I’m going to publicly get up in front of the company and have failed on this goal, but we disagree. We agreed to disagree that this is possible. What’s also funny though is I was like, I think he really believed it was possible and he’s very smart. And of course, then I’m going home. I’m driving home at night. I’m like, has he ever built anything like this? No. Why am I even listening to him?
But they reality distort you into thinking yes, it’s completely possible. I don’t know how I got fooled. Point is I knew — but what I did commit to myself is I have to make meaningful progress. What are some of the milestones we can point to? What you do is you go in and you say, “Well, I was not convinced this was the right goal, but I agreed to it. Here are the milestones that I’m glad we hit.”
You don’t forget to point out you’ve made progress. I think sometimes people get — they’re like, “I don’t want to be defensive.” But you have to be like, look, it’s like not like nothing happened. And then you try to be data-driven. And what I think, because this is where the context matters, Stripe’s founders and Stripe’s culture is very learning-oriented. You think what kind of —
Tim Ferriss: Very, very. More so than almost maybe any startup I’ve come across.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: At an early stage too.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yes. Think about the cultural context you’re in. And so, the first thing I’ve learned this and I — what did we learn? What did we not know and what did we learn trying to get there on this goal? What did I learn?
By the way, some of them are mistakes I made. And so, try to be humble. Stripe is also a very humble culture to say, “Here’s some things I thought I knew.” By the way, I thought I did know. I was like, “We were going to outsource certain things that I thought was going to be easier than it was, and that is true. And here’s what I learned. Here’s what I thought. Here’s what the truth was. Here’s what I learned. Here’s now what we’re going to do differently.”
By the way, everyone’s nodding in the room because they’re like, “Cool, cool.” We had a plan, we tried it. I mean, they’re engineers, they know, it did not work the way we thought it was going to work. We’re going to try this other thing. You basically do a retro postmortem, whatever you want to call it, publicly in front of everyone in the language they like speaking.
The language Stripe likes speaking is learning. I made mistakes. What am I doing differently? What do I see next? How are we going to get there now? You know what I mean? It’s I’m confident but humbled by this experience and I’ve learned a lot. And here’s some data that shows we have made some progress because that, also — people want to make sure, [do] we actually know what we’re doing? That’s what you do, and I think it depends on your context and what language do you speak.
Tim Ferriss: That is a big example. This is a big example we’re talking about. And that is, I think, a very effective way to, as a player, offer a mea culpa in a way. At that point then, and this may be, if this is going to require a dissertation, then tell me, and I can rejig. But how did you decide to scope the thing and then make a counter offer effectively? Or was that even your decision to make? I don’t know. In terms of like, okay, we’ve learned these things. These are some assumptions.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. I think —
Tim Ferriss: And then leading into the “Now what?”
Claire Hughes Johnson: I won’t do the dissertation version, Tim. But I will tell you one bind I found myself in consistently that I’m sure you have also is it’s a talent bind, which is I can only do so many things at once individually, me alone. And I did feel like a victim. I’m going to be honest, because I had been trying to hire someone. I had hired someone. They hadn’t worked out. Partly my fault, partly not my fault.
And I’m in a meeting. I mean, this happened so many times, we could picture any — but I’m talking to Patrick and I’m like, “Look, we know so-and-so didn’t work out. Here’s what happened with that. We now face a choice, which is you have Claire as a resource. Me, alone. Am I going to go lead support directly? Am I going to go start building this thing with most of my time? And what is the opportunity cost of that?” What is the trade-off of me not leading sales by the way at that moment, which I was also leading.
And this is where I fell into a trap, I had a few too many needing to clone myself problems. And this happens when you’re growing quickly, but it’s still, I got into an egregious case of needing cloning. And so, then we’re having a renegotiation conversation.
Tim Ferriss: Not even a reasonable case of needed cloning. Egregious.
Claire Hughes Johnson: It was egregious. It was egregious. There was one point where, I mean I think it’s important that people, especially because they seem to think I have some storied career. I’m like, there was a moment where I had taken a former colleague from Google — who I was admittedly, I’ll be honest, was trying to recruit to Stripe — out for a coffee.
Tim Ferriss: “You’re just going to be a board observer, just come once.”
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah, right, exactly. Exactly. And he says to me, he used to actually work for me and he knew how much I pride myself on good management practices. And he asked me, “How many direct reports do you have?” And I told him and he almost — I had to peel him off the ground. He’s like, “I can’t believe you let that happen to you.” He was like, “What happened to the Claire Johnson that I know?” I’m like, “I know. I’m so sorry.” I had so many direct reports.
Tim Ferriss: How many direct reports?
Claire Hughes Johnson: It was a crime.
Tim Ferriss: At peak.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I think the peak, I want to say the peak too was 23, but it might’ve been 27. And I just lost control of — I really don’t — Tim, I didn’t want to go here.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a lot of one-on-ones.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I didn’t want to go here. It’s so many one-on-ones. And of course, I do actually make one-on-ones happen. Point is I got schooled by my former direct report for violating my own rules in the need for cloning. But the point is the negotiation turns from, we’re negotiating you getting this massive goal done to what’s the cost of me getting that goal done for the other priorities? And then you’re making a joint decision.
By the way, the outcome of that negotiation could have been let’s not build out sales any further. Let’s not keep internationalizing. Let’s not open new markets. Let’s wait on those other things because we decided you should just go and be directly the head of support, honestly. That was not where the conversation went. It was like, okay, what creative ideas do we have to somehow do both reality distorting, that’s fine. But actually, you’ve got to push yourself.
And so I think in that exact moment, if I’m remembering the scenario, we talked about some talented people. I had hired some people into the org who we were like, could we lean on them? Could we put some newer leaders, managers into the deep end and get them to take on more of this plan? And in the end, that was part of the solution. Which is let’s take some risks with some people we have, give them more than they probably are ready for and see if they can swim. Which I’m not always a fan of because I have seen people not make it out of the pool.
But I think that that was — by the way, a lot of young companies find themselves in that situation. And if you have great hiring, which we did, I’m proud to say that. Actually that’s where opportunities and magic can happen for people. I’m going to get to build out the global support org. But anyway, so we ended up compromising, but we weren’t going to trade off my other responsibilities. And that became a more important discussion about how do I deploy Patrick? Anyone who’s the CEO has got to be thinking, “Well, who are my most important resources and how am I deploying them against the most important priorities?” Take the negotiation up to that level would be my advice.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a great macro renegotiation example. And we’re not going to stay on this forever, but I want to spend a little more time on it. When you’re renegotiating the next day. We’re moving down to the micro here, what language do you use? You have a meeting booked, you’ve got a lunch booked in Boston, you’ve got this, you’ve got that, and the other thing. When you reach out to these folks, what do you say?
Claire Hughes Johnson: I think you want to, again, be a player, not a victim, and you’ve got to take responsibility. I think there is a version of saying — I don’t love if it’s the next day, that’s rough.
Tim Ferriss: It could be the next week too. It’s just broadly speaking.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I do actually tend to look at my calendar at least a week ahead and start renegotiating. I don’t like to be the one who’s the morning of or the day before. But I think you own it, whether this is an email. It’s probably an email, it might be a text.
And you say, “First of all, I’m very sorry. I know we had time tomorrow on the calendar. I am staring at a list of priorities and I’ve realized I cannot make…” You’re saying something that doesn’t hopefully make them feel diminished and say — I mean I often will tell them there’s this thing. “I am on this board in the middle of a transaction and I have to be on a phone call for four hours tomorrow. And unfortunately, I think I need some time to prep. I need some time to prep, and I booked our lunch and it’s not realistic. I’m not going to be able to be present at that lunch.” It’s not great.
I try to give, I’m probably over-context people, but I think it makes you more human. It’s like, “Look, I did this thing, I’m sorry. And I realize…”
Tim Ferriss: What if you don’t have a house fire to point to? What if you just look at it and you’re like, “Ah.”
Claire Hughes Johnson: You’re like, “You’re not important.” Yeah. Yeah. No, no.
Tim Ferriss: But you get it. You’re like, “Why did I agree to moderate…”
Claire Hughes Johnson: Why did I mail myself the letter bomb? Who mails themselves?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, the ghost of Christmas past is coming to scratch at my door and I’m realizing I don’t want to moderate this panel in Tuscaloosa. No offense to Tuscaloosa, but you get the idea. Because I’ve got all this other stuff going on and I just don’t want to spend the energy. What do you do in a case like that?
Claire Hughes Johnson: Again, I try not to be the day before, but that is —
Tim Ferriss: Sure. No, let’s say you look out and you’re like, okay, this thing is in two weeks.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I’m not doing this thing. Yeah. I mean is again, my instinct is always to offer context and be a little bit vulnerable, which maybe is not expected. I think you also know, I think women will get judged more for certain things. And in particular, not being conscientious is the thing that gets a little more beaten into you is my feeling as a woman.
And so you have to also watch out for creating some reputational issue that I think maybe not everyone has to watch out for. Maybe some of my instinct to offer more information is to try to avoid that hit. But I’ve been saying to people recently actually that I have reworked my personal priorities. And the demands of my time are higher than I’ve actually seen in my professional life, which is true.
And I have realized that I cannot do a good job of some of the commitments I’ve made. And unfortunately, I can’t travel and be on this panel and be effective for you. And this is where I feel sometimes I’m a little weak. I’ll try to offer, I’ll be like, I mean I try to think, do I know anyone locally who could do this? I’ll be like, “I think I have an idea. If you want an idea on someone who could sub in,” I’ll try to find some solution for them if I’m really leaving them in a lurch, because I don’t love that. But I am just honest about, “I can’t do this well, and I think you want someone at their best. It’s not going to be my best.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s good language. That’s really good language. I’m not going to drag us back into the swamp of selling literature, but it’s good language. That’s good wordsmithing. Right?
Claire Hughes Johnson: Right. And I think you’re showing self-awareness. Look, I looked at priorities. I realized — and also you’re showing context, which is this is a true statement. I’m like, “I have more demands on my time than I’ve ever had in my life. And I’m learning to cope with it and I’m learning that I can’t perform at the level I’d like to perform. And I don’t want you to suffer for that.”
You want to show respect for people. They want a good panel, they want your best. You’re saying, “Please, just you have to trust me. I’m not going to be great.” And they’ll be disappointed. One thing that I do think, I think Sheryl’s an example of this. There are people I’ve come to respect there are the people who protect their time like demons. The other people I’ve come to respect are the people who are very comfortable just saying, “No. You know what? No, I’m sorry. I can’t do that.”
My hope for myself, my future self, is I am not in the situation where I’m doing that renegotiation. Again, it goes back to being honest, taking time before you make the commitment, just saying no. But it’s also with investments, a lot of founders will be like — or even nonprofits, they come and they’re like, “I want to tell you about our organization.”
And you’re like, “Oh, that organization sounds amazing.” And then you’re like, but then do you want to waste an hour of your time and their time learning about it when you realize I don’t have time to commit a lot to this organization. What they would rather have is one, “No, it’s not on my list of causes that I support.” Or by the way, two, “I will give you X amount of money. You never have to meet with me. I don’t actually have time, but sounds good. Here’s some money. Goodbye.”
And they’ll say, “Well, can you make that commitment for multiple years in a row?” Sure, but maybe, maybe not. Like you say, “Well, let’s learn.” But I think getting faster at, there’s a pattern here which is you want my money and my time? Am I willing to give any money or time? Yes, no. If I’m willing to get a little bit, just tell them and get out.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Don’t have a dog and pony show about it. Or investments, I just don’t really invest in a lot of B2C. I’ll just write back and say, “This is not for me. I don’t really do B2C. Good luck.” And they’re like, “Thank you.” Because they didn’t waste their time sending you a deck. Sending you —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, they’re not chasing the Glengarry leads forever.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And so you think you’re being an empath by saying, “Oh, let me hear your story.” This is my trap. My personal trap is I think I’m being an empath, giving them 30 minutes. “Let me hear your story.” And in fact, the empathic thing to do is to say, “I’m going to do a probability assessment. The chance that I’m going to invest/make a donation are sub five percent. No. No for you, no for me. And you don’t have to think about it ever again. You don’t have have to email me tomorrow and ask me again.” They’re going to keep coming back.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I love that. I’m so glad I asked and a great answer. Also, very useful, useful, useful answer. What are some other rules? We are going to back the car into the garage of self-awareness.
Because a lot of this pulls at the hem of self-awareness from a bunch of different directions. But you mentioned that there are certain rules you have because your kid has gone off to college and therefore, X, Y, and Z. What are some of the other rules that you have for yourself around what you will or will not do?
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. Well, I have a rule. This is more of just a self-awareness. I do get intuitive and I do jump to judgments, conclusions, solutions quickly. I have a rule that especially if I’m in a position of leadership and I’m in a meeting and there’s other people, instead of stating my opinion, I have to ask a question. Because if you’re the senior person and you state your opinion, the whole thing is over, you’re not really going to get — you’ve got to ask a question.
Tim Ferriss: “Yeah, Steve, we can ship it in five minutes.”
Claire Hughes Johnson: Exactly. “Here’s an iPhone.” That’s a rule. I think in terms of commitments I make —
Tim Ferriss: Could you give me example of what that would — because you could also ask a question in a way that makes it clear, it’s your strong opinion.
Claire Hughes Johnson: No, you could. You could. Yeah. You could.
Tim Ferriss: What might that look like?
Claire Hughes Johnson: What it looks like is they’re looking to you. They say, “I think we need to X.” And they’re looking at you. And you say, “I have a thought. I do. I’ll share it, but actually I’m interested in what you all think we should do.”
Tim Ferriss: Got it.
Claire Hughes Johnson: “I want to learn from your thought before I share mine.” And that’s, by the way, the benefit of seniority is you can be like, “No, I’m not going to try…”
Tim Ferriss: “I appreciate and refuse to answer your question.”
Claire Hughes Johnson: “I’m not going to perform right now. I will perform later because I actually want you to participate.” I’m often now in a position of sort coaching leaders and because I’m more of an operator, not a professional coach, I have the same problem. I’ll be like, “Oh, my God, this is obvious. Here’s what you’re going to do.”
And then I think, no, no, no, no, no, no. I’ll say to them, “All right. Give me the bones of the situation.” And then I’ll start to tell them what I think and I’m like, no. And I’ll say, “You know what?” I totally commentate. I’m like a sports color commentator. I’m like, “I was about to jump in and tell you exactly what I would do if I were you.” And they’re at the edge of their seat because that’s what they came for. That’s what they want.
And I say, “That is, we’re not going to learn from that.” And I said, “We’re not going to learn from that. What I want you to do is tell me your instinct. What is it you think you’re doing next?” And I don’t even say “Give me the whole answer.” I’m like, “What would you do next?” It’s often a situation. There’s an executive they think is underperforming, there’s a team off the rails, whatever. I’m like, “What are you going to do next?”
Then I get them talking and then I get out from them. And I’ll tell you Tim, I mean there’s a reason these people are leaders. Most of the time they’re 80 percent of the way there. They’re just not confident in their instinct. And so my job is not to tell them what to do or how to do it. It is to build their confidence in their instinct and then yeah, we can brainstorm the last 20 percent.
And I mean it’s just good, and this is a total digression, but good pedagogy. How do people learn? People do not learn by being told answers. We all know this, but yet we get some amount of experience in our life and we think, “I’m going to go tell some people some answers.” No. What you’re going to do if you’re a good leader, a good teacher, is you’re going to lead them through learning with you and they are going to get to the answer and you are going to celebrate them doing that.
But I cannot tell you how many times I myself have to create a rule to shut my own mouth because I love helping people. Luckily I don’t think it’s the know-it-all version of this. I think it’s the “I can help you. Oh, my God, I see how to help you,” and I just want to tell them the answer. And I’ve got to zip it. Zip it.
One rule is like, yeah, I make a travel rule. Another rule I make is as I already told you, which is don’t say yes immediately. It has to be very rare for me to say yes immediately. And as a pleaser, that’s very hard to be like, “No, I’m sorry, I have to get back to you next week.”
Tim Ferriss: How often do you say, “I have to get back to you next week” versus, “I’m not sure, can you get back to me next week?” Versus — in other words, where does the ball fall in this court?
Claire Hughes Johnson: Good feedback for me, Tim. And I take it. Thank you. No, I think that is actually a really good tactic that I don’t do enough of is to say, “I think this is unlikely that I’m going to be able to do this. I’m willing to consider it, but what I’d like you to do is go look at your other options. And if you’re not finding something, feel free to get back to me by the end of the month and I will consider it.”
But it’s you’re basically telegraphing, “I want to try to help you, but I can’t. You’ve got to go to your plan B. I’m not going to be your keynote speaker.” And that’s a great feedback. I think that’s a good — maybe even it’s just a — if you find yourself doing that, you should be asking yourself why Is it just not a no?
Tim Ferriss: It’s a no. Yeah.
Claire Hughes Johnson: It’s no for me.
Tim Ferriss: It’s a no.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Tim, right? But maybe it’s a way to trial yourself into realizing, oh, this is a no.
Tim Ferriss: This is the training wheels. Yeah.
Claire Hughes Johnson: But I like your idea, which is put the ball in their court. Which is maybe, again, it’s back to some donation request or something. Why are you get in touch? This is not for me now. Feel free to get in touch in the future. A lot of those people might just not ever. And I mean, sorry for them because they’re not persistent. But is that being a player? Is that being a player enough? I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, hitting the snooze button can lead to a delayed 24-car pileup later, in my experience. Right.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Good analogy.
Tim Ferriss: I was chatting with a friend of mine about this because I’m fascinated by rules for folks who handle a lot of inbound of any type and his rule for the charitable stuff specifically. Like, “Oh, here’s my GoFundMe,” or this or this. He’s like, “Well, look.” He’s done very, very well professionally. And he’s like, “Okay, look,” if it’s a friend and it’s basically any cause that’s not going to entail reputational risk. If it’s like, “Ah, my buddy’s doing a climbing Kilimanjaro for prostate cancer and he has a GoFundMe,” they’ll basically give 5K to anything, sight unseen. Because the universe of possible acquaintances or friends who’s going to come to them with that is pretty limited. But the rule is 5K, that’s it. That’s our rule. And then for anything large, it’s just like we focus on this and this and this, and outside of that, we are not involved. That’s it.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah, no, I think that is so powerful. That would be another rule is for something that’s a major commitment of my time or my resources. Someone said to me, it’s time, treasure —
Tim Ferriss: Talent.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Talent. But there’s another one: that’s testimony.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Which I love.
Tim Ferriss: Time, treasure is capital.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Treasure, talent, and testimony. And testimony is interesting, right? You could, Tim, care about something that you can’t give time to. And you could say, “If you need a quote from me,” I mean again, now we’re in this weird rarefied air where someone might want to quote from probably not me. But I think that that’s another thing you could do. But the thing that for any of those categories, you need some criteria. Which is some people it’s about climate. If it’s not related to climate and working on the climate crisis, it’s a no. And I think those people actually make more friends than I probably make. Because I’m like, I’m not sure. That sounds so important. Anyway.
Tim Ferriss: Excuse me. Just to ask a clarifying question on one. Time, I get. That seems pretty straightforward, hours, minutes. Treasure, it’s like financial resources, things of that type. Testimony, like endorsing something or some version of that.
Claire Hughes Johnson: By the way, a version of that might be like, “Can I introduce you to someone and endorse you?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Totally.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: What is talent? I mean I understand the word. But I think of talent as if they’re utilizing your talent, wouldn’t that fall into the time bucket or is it a separate thing?
Claire Hughes Johnson: I had a similar question because this was a friend of mine who was facilitating this workshop with people trying to think about what their criteria were for what am I going to spend my time on. I think that the version of it is you say to someone — I agree with you, I can’t really deploy my particular talent without putting some time in. But the example was say you are very good at some specific thing and the thing takes you less than 30 minutes.
They’re like, “All right. I don’t want you to join my board, but can you read this press release and tell me is it good or not?” I think it’s like, “You know what? I can’t give you my time. I can’t join a board. I can’t commit to a regular meeting.” If you specific — it’s almost what I say to some of the founders I work with. I’m like, “Don’t expect me to read the newsletter and try to volunteer for all the things you need. But if you think my particular talent is going to be useful…”
And here’s what it often looks like, Tim, is they send me profiles of people they’re thinking of hiring and I give them a five-minute Claire assessment. And so that is my time, but I don’t get on the phone. I’m just like, “Here’s the questions.” Usually how it comes back because I’m all about questions is, “Here’s the three to five questions I’d have about this background.
If I’m you and I’m hiring for this role, I’d be like, ‘Why did they move around five times? Why did they stop doing that job?’ I would just give them interview questions and then I would back away.” You’re right. It takes me a minute, but it’s not —
Tim Ferriss: You are —
Claire Hughes Johnson: You probably have a version of that. I’ve heard people text you with very specific, which supplements should I take? Or should I intermittent fast?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I get that kind of stuff.
Claire Hughes Johnson: You could probably text back, “This one. No, this one.” That’s probably still time and you probably should count how much time it is, but it’s a way to stay connected.
Tim Ferriss: It’s compressed, because of the expertise/exposure.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Right. You already know the answer. You have the talent, you don’t have to go do extra work and you can answer quickly.
Tim Ferriss: Quick add-on, because I realize you’ve done so much hiring and develop so much talent. I’m so curious how you spot bad apples or elicit negative feedback or infer negative feedback when in the US it is so incredibly difficult to get honest negative feedback from anyone because they’re so concerned about liability.
Claire Hughes Johnson: You’re talking about references?
Tim Ferriss: Hiring. Yes, references, exactly.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. I mean the non-dissertation answer is one, I mean this is like people have trouble giving hard feedback. People have trouble asking this question, which is I think a question you just ask, which is like, “Is this someone in the top 20 percent of people you’ve ever worked with?” And then they say, “Yes.” You say, “Top 10?” And then if they say “Yes,” “Oh, so is it top five?” And then they’re like —
Because what happens is when people are asked for a very specific quantifiable ranking of something, they don’t like lying. And so what I think happens is we are not comfortable asking for ranking questions sometimes about humans. And I don’t love them actually in most contexts. But in this case I’m like, I’m going to pin you down on how good this person really is. And how they handle.
And you could go just to top five, but I think that’s the short answer. I think the other answer is you say to someone, you put them again in the role of you say, “Look, I’m going to be their manager. You were their manager. What’s the thing I could do that’s most important to help them?”
Tim Ferriss: That’s a good question.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And people will say some very revealing things. Because all of a sudden they get back, being the manager of the person. And they’re like, “Well, I’ll tell them to really be more truthful when things are off the rails.” You’re like, “What?”
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God. Yeah.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And then you’ll get going. You’ll be like, “Tell me a situation where you had to use that advice.” “What?” Anyway, so those are two, one very specific —
Tim Ferriss: Excellent.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Pin them down and one a little more tricky.
Tim Ferriss: So good. Oh, deft. Very, very elegant. All right. As promised, the garage of self-awareness. That is the very strained analogy that I used. And tell me if this ties in. And I’m curious what good answers to this question might be, but I do want to talk about self-awareness so we can go into it however you would like because this is the foundational layer for everything that is built upon it or it seems that way to me.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yep. That’s my hypothesis.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Actually, I was going to ask you about the question, “When have you seen me do my best and worst work?” But we can come back to that. We can come back to that. I’m going to bookmark that. Maybe we’ll get to it, maybe we won’t.
But how should people think about self-awareness? And I’m just going to share something that I found in the course of doing homework. And you can certainly fact check this. But I thought it was quite thought-provoking. This is from CNBC and I think it was an interview with you. This is, if you’re not self-aware, how would you know? That’s a hell of a question. It’s like the tree falling in the forest, no one to hear it kind of question. Here are some telltale signs. You consistently get feedback that you disagree with. This doesn’t mean the feedback is correct, but it does mean how others perceive you differs from how you perceive yourself. Interesting. I added the “interesting.” You often feel frustrated and annoyed because you don’t agree with your team’s direction or decisions. You feel drained at the end of a workday and can’t pinpoint why, you can’t describe what work you do and don’t enjoy doing. So that’s setting the table or maybe just piquing people’s curiosity. How would you suggest people think about self-awareness? Why is this important in the worlds in which you operate?
Claire Hughes Johnson: I spend a lot of time thinking about how do you get results through people, through teams. I’m not actually the one building the product, so I’ve got to do it through brute force human brain power and human time. And I think that most people who think that way start with the individuals you’re managing or the team or the organization. And my argument is where you started this section of the garage, the foundation is self-awareness. It actually has to start with you. You’re not going to get great results from the people around you until you understand yourself. And I think there’s some obvious reasons why, which is like, “I alone can’t move the mountain. I need you and I need to compliment myself. How am I going to compliment myself with other capabilities and skills if I don’t understand what I’m bringing to the table?”
By the way, a lot of people think they’re the director at every scene. No, you’re not. You’re often an extra. And just knowing that will make you more effective. So that’s a side piece of advice for you.
But a lot of self-awareness building, to me, a lot of these work style assessments you can take are just trying to help you figure out your defaults, “What’s my default setting?” So a lot of them are asking you are you more introverted or extroverted? So they have —
Tim Ferriss: So you’re talking about, I guess, for maybe lack of a better descriptor, almost personality typing tests like Myers-Briggs.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Myers-Briggs, DiSC, Enneagram. I mean there’s Discovery Insights, there’s the Hogan Assessment — that’s 170 questions. There’s the Big Five personality test.
Tim Ferriss: There’s a lot of them. StrengthsFinder. It goes on and on.
Claire Hughes Johnson: StrengthsFinder, good one. There’s so many. But to me, they all boil down to, on one axis, let’s call it the horizontal axis. You’ve got, “Are you more introverted or extroverted?” And the litmus test is introverts think to talk and extroverts talk to think, so where do you fall on that continuum? And then the other thing is the vertical axis, which is are you more task-oriented or people-oriented? Which, by the way, doesn’t mean you can’t get a task done. And my litmus test for this is if someone comes to you with a massive problem in some organization, is the first thing you think of the first task that has to get done or, “Oh, my God, the people.” And it’s just what do you lead with?
For me, I’ll be like, “Oh, my gosh, someone’s getting fired.” Which is a task and a person answer, but anyway. Sorry, I’m being very negative today.
Tim Ferriss: It’s not negative.
Claire Hughes Johnson: But I would say it boils down then. And then you think, “What quadrant am I in? Am I a more extroverted, task-oriented type person or extroverted people?” By the way, a lot of extroverted, people-oriented people are excellent at sales. Makes sense. Their default is, “I love getting stuff done talking to you. Yay.” And then you’ve got your introverted, task-oriented people. Where do a lot of those people work, Tim, do you think, introverted, task-oriented people?
Tim Ferriss: Engineering, programming.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Engineering, finance.
Tim Ferriss: Finance.
Claire Hughes Johnson: “Give me a spreadsheet and I will rule the world. I do not need to talk to you to finish this model.” In fact, you often do, and I know that. And so that’s the other thing is you have to be really careful not to stereotype with any of this and not to generalize, but I think it helps any human. Frameworks are useful for a reason, which is I am comfortable saying, “Where can I place myself in these quadrants? And then what does that mean my default setting is? And by the way, the people around me have different default settings.” This is such a dumb tactical lesson, but I am one of those people where if I trust who I’m meeting with, I don’t need the agenda ahead of time.
I’ll be like, “Let’s meet.” And then at the very beginning of the meeting, bang out the agenda, make sure we know what we’re going to get done. I still like to run it well, but I’m loose with the prep. I have people who’ve worked for me who are frozen if they’re like, “I don’t have time to think ahead of this meeting what we’re going to talk about.” And I’m thinking there’s something wrong with them. I’m like, “Well, come on. We trust each other. We’ve worked together. We’re just going to spitball about this.” And they’re like, “No, I don’t want to meet with you.” I had to learn that there are humans in the world who, if they don’t have time to think before a meeting, will not be effective in the meeting and will be uncomfortable because my water is really different than that. Really different.
But if you’re trying to create an environment that’s conducive to different styles, different defaults, you’ve got to be aware of your own and then realize, “And I have to operate aware of others because I want that meeting to be really effective. And I’ve got to email Richard the day before and tell him we’re going to spitball ideas for this new marketing campaign.” Does that make —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, totally makes sense.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I mean, that’s what it all boils down to, but it’s default settings.
Tim Ferriss: And it’s really cultivating awareness, but starting at home in the sense.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Start at home and then start to map other people —
Tim Ferriss: The guinea pig is always in the cage right next to you in that case. Some cases are a little easier to study. Coming back to the personality test for a second, I’m not sure if that’s the right way to categorize them, Myers-Briggs, DiSC, Enneagram, et cetera.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Work style assessments.
Tim Ferriss: Work style assessments. If you could only choose one or two that have been most helpful to you personally, what would you choose?
Claire Hughes Johnson: I would say there’s one that’s called, I think if you just Google, it’s Insights Discovery, which is to me more effective than Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs has a lot of interpretive work you have to do on your results. Understand what sensing is. Understand what the decision-making process of a sensing judge or whatever. Insights maps you more, and they have some shading in colors, but it’s more straightforward. That is one I’m a fan of.
The other is more of a simple one, but Patrick Collison, obviously who I’ve worked with. I think I brought him around. He felt these things are horoscopes. He’s like, “They’re just going to give you a report and it’s going to sound like a plausible prediction of you.” And I said, “I get it. I get the skepticism,” and I really do by the way, for anyone, and actually, I think there’s value in getting a horoscope, which is like, “Well, how does it actually make me feel?” Like, “Do I agree with it or not? What am I really?” It actually is part of a process in my opinion.
Tim Ferriss: It is a prompt, a Rorschach prompt.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yes. It’s a prompt and how you react to it is interesting. You’re like, “Yes, I am finding love this year. Or am I not?” So point is he then did some research and there is one, the Big Five personality test is very simple. It’s available for free online as far as I can tell or I’ve seen. And it’s just these five factors, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness. There’s one that’s entrepreneurial, comfort with ambiguity, whatever. And you can tell a lot from, well one, the research supports that they’re pretty indicative of certain human behaviors. You and I have had a lot of conversations in this discussion about things like saying yes too easily. But if you’re very high agreeableness and very high conscientiousness, guess what? You’re going to end up committing to too much stuff.
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And so when I’m saying, “I’m jealous of those people who protect their time.” You know what? They’re pretty comfortable being disagreeable. They’re pretty comfortable being like, “No.” Or frankly, canceling at the last minute saying, “Sorry, I don’t have time today for you.” And if they’re not very conscientious, they’re like, “I don’t even feel bad.” But by the way, no judgment. A lot of founders are really good about being like, “I’m doing the most important thing that I’ve got to be doing today and I’m the operator.” I’m like, “But we made a bunch of commitments and we made a plan and we’ve got to stick to the plan.” And that meeting of those styles is very powerful, that’s why you want a diverse team. But anyway, I would say those two.
Tim Ferriss: Patrick is endlessly fascinating. He’s been on the show probably a couple of years ago, but boy oh, boy, does that man read. He is a voracious consumer of knowledge.
Claire Hughes Johnson: He is. He puts the rest of us to shame. You know what though, Tim? I bet he’s never seen John Wick.
Tim Ferriss: So we have that.
Claire Hughes Johnson: We have that going for us. We do.
Tim Ferriss: One-zero, Ferriss calls it. Put Wick on the scoreboard.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yep. We were actually in a meeting and he said something about Gregg Popovich and two of us looked at each other, we’re like, “Do you really know who Gregg Popovich is?” And it was amazing because Patrick also is not super up on sports, popular culture. We all have our strengths.
Tim Ferriss: Popovich, also incredible.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Talk about leadership.
Tim Ferriss: Somebody I would love to have on the show at some point. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Or that’s why he knew.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. So going to the black belts of no, I’m wondering if there are people who stand out outside of the Collisons as people who are paragons of no. People who are really good at saying no or defending their time where you’re like, “Wow, that person’s really good at keeping their eye on the one puck that matters.” Anybody come to mind?
Claire Hughes Johnson: Well I mentioned to you, I think Sheryl’s very good at getting back, being very accessible and fast and decisive, like, “No.” Efficient. She’s very efficient, and sometimes that efficiency is a no. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Who else have I worked with that are — I mean, my version of it is someone who I think is least doing it carefully with others’ feelings. I think that I don’t love the person who has an assistant, for example, who cancels everything. No. There’s a model here, Tim, you’ve seen it, where they agree to everything and then they have a cleanup crew.
Tim Ferriss: It’s super lame.
Claire Hughes Johnson: They have a cleanup crew.
Tim Ferriss: They send The Wolf from Pulp Fiction. They send it out to do the dirty work.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Yeah. And I think what’s happening is I’m doing left-hand column filtering names of people right now in my mind where I’m like, “Nope, can’t mention them.” Because I think they actually have a cleanup crew.
Tim Ferriss: They use the cleanup crew.
Claire Hughes Johnson: They use the cleanup crew. There aren’t that many who seem — I think you have some good — I think it’s in 4-Hour Workweek, you have some good models of pushing people on not just being busy, but being productive. There’s some engineering leaders I worked with at Google who I thought was very bold, but it of course makes sense. They would look at what were we planning in a meeting. And they’d be like, “I don’t need to be here,” or, “This meeting doesn’t seem important.” And to me those are paragons of no, though, because it was very open, very direct, very honest. It was like, “I see what you’re trying to do with this one hour and I am not giving you my hour.” Why can’t more people just call it?
Tim Ferriss: Uncomfortable.
Claire Hughes Johnson: There’s a finance guy that I’m on a board with, and he’ll be like, “What are we trying to accomplish in this? And how long do we need?” And he’ll set his, “I’m here for that objective and I’m only here for this long.” And I admire it because he’s like, “Don’t be chatting away about other stuff. I want to be productive. Not busy.”
Tim Ferriss: “Don’t want to hear about your fishing trip right now, Ralph.”
Claire Hughes Johnson: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: So speaking, just because you mentioned the board, why no more boards? Just the thinking behind it?
Claire Hughes Johnson: There are different motivations for being on boards. I don’t know if you serve on boards.
Tim Ferriss: No, I’ve basically from the beginning having run into a lot of people — I have a number of friends who have policies that they won’t join any more boards. And I took that as —
Claire Hughes Johnson: As a sign and you should.
Tim Ferriss: — an indicator. And so I’ve only done advising. I’ve never been on boards.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And I think I would say there’s a sector of the world that feels it is a service. And I do think it’s a valuable service. By the way, I serve on some boards with some people who are like Jedi master board members. And I’m like, “Wow, you are serving these companies because you are awesome at governance and proxy statements, politics, and you get it.” But I think there’s a service motivation. There’s a motivation that has to do with maybe a personal, CEO really trusts you, you want to help them. That’s mostly what happens with me. I’m like, “I want to be there for that person.” But it is a big commitment. And if you’re someone who’s realized that time is your most precious resource, which is my mom realized somehow when she was 19 but I did not, boards can stomp all over your calendar. They can just say, “All day Friday, someone just made an acquisition offer,” and you’re like, “Goodbye.”
You realize you think you’re controlling your time because they don’t meet that often, but no, no, no, no. So really what I’ve decided is I need to go on a board diet and then rebuild. I’m not going to say no ever, like, “I’m never doing it again.” But I’ve realized the bar has to be extremely high. I mean, I’m on the board, one of my favorite boards and I would do it forever, I don’t know if I’m adding that much value, but is The Atlantic. Which is private, so it’s easier, but the quality of the people involved, it’s a very different part of my brain. We’re doing the business brain stuff, but there’s also, you get to meet these amazing writers and you get to be part of exchange of ideas about the future of democracy.
Like, “Yes.” That’s enriching me. That’s the other thing is making sure there’s an exchange in the board of your learning. You’re getting enriched, they’re benefiting. And I don’t think it’s easy to always get that balance right. And so you just have to be careful. I think you just have to be, and I think I just didn’t realize the level of commitment, not just time, but to do it well. I mean, it goes back to renegotiating. So what I’m doing is I’m saying no more boards until I’ve renegotiated some of my current commitments. And then we’ll see that the bar has —
Tim Ferriss: That’s also a very powerful language right there. Categorically, I’m saying I have a policy of saying no to X until I have A, B, and C.
Claire Hughes Johnson: That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Done deal.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And by the way, people can’t argue with that because they’re like, “That does sound like a very sane thing to do.” But I have a lot of appreciation more than I did before of folks who do this in service because governance matters. It matters for institutions, not just companies if done well and it should be done well. But gosh, it’s a big commitment.
Tim Ferriss: Be careful with those big commitments, folks. They sneak up on you.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Anything that has multiple years attached to it.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Oh, boy. It’s the scope creep, time evaporating version of the best business model of all time, which is being a venture capitalist where you have these stacked funds. That’s great if you’re taking your two and 20. But if it’s a commitment of your time over multiple years, and then they start to stack and oh, my God, then you’re 27 snow layers deep in the avalanche of time requests.
Claire Hughes Johnson: That’s right. And you get a 10-year horizon at minimum, and that seems exciting at the beginning. And then you stack another 10 and another 10 and you’re like, “Wait a minute.” All of a sudden, I’m 65 years old. And anyway. Yes, some funds have closed and hopefully you’ve done well, but you made commitments before those things happen to another set of them. So it’s a rolling avalanche. The avalanche is not ending.
Tim Ferriss: Do not say yes right away, folks.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Especially to multi-year commitments. That’s probably the headline. That and The Toy is Broken.
Tim Ferriss: I’m telling you, that’s your next book. I really think it could do well. I have to ask this because it’s of acute interest for me personally, also because it might help me individually, but also with employees of mine, managing high performers. How do you get extraordinary output from extraordinary people without burning them out or letting them burn themselves out?
Claire Hughes Johnson: If I was like, “What are the pantheon of management lessons? So one of them is you’ve got to manage different people differently. Another pantheon lesson is spend disproportionate amount of time with your high performers, because instead what we all do is get all of our time sucked by the folks who are struggling and then we don’t invest in the high performers, and then they’re either burning themselves out or finding a new opportunity because they’re not realizing their high performers and benefiting, or they know they are and they’re not getting investment and they’re like, “I’m going to go get investment somewhere else.” So number one, is how do you manage them? Is you make sure that they are a priority of yours, even though they are perfectly good on their own which is the dilemma. Like, “How do I help them?” In my book, I steal, I mean I don’t steal, I credit, I source a lot of frameworks.
Tim Ferriss: The book, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building.
Claire Hughes Johnson: Oh, yes, Thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Just to throw it in there.
Claire Hughes Johnson: So there are a lot of QR codes. You can scan and look at the sites where I reference a lot of materials and books. Conscious Business, Fred Kofman’s in there. One framework, I mean as far as I can tell, I made up myself was a top talent framework, which is again, I try to simplify things. But I think high performers fall into two categories, and I call them pushers and pullers. And so the pusher is the one who’s like, “Give me more, give me more.” They’re often wanting to get more comp too, but they’re like, “I want recognition. I want responsibility. I want scope. I want to move the needle. I’m high impact.” They’re very impatient with themselves, with other people. They can be a little high friction for the team they’re going for it, grabbing it.
But it’s fun because you load them up and they’re just carrying the whole thing up the hill without you. But they can be tough. I mean, my main coaching often ends up with them is saying, “Until I believe that the people working with you love working with you, I don’t think you’re succeeding.” And they’re like, “What?” Because all keeping score, but they’re keeping score in the maybe early in his life, Tim Ferriss version. I don’t know.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no, that’s a fair assessment. I mean, I think I am a pusher as an entrepreneur for sure. And I’ve learned how that can be a liability. It can be a huge superpower and it can be a huge liability.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I say giving direct feedback is holding up a mirror and just being like, “Here’s the beauty of you and here’s the liability part.” And if you can’t show me that you can work on the liability part, I can’t keep loading you up because in the case of the pusher, they might burn themselves out, but they actually burn out the people around them. So that’s the pusher. So the puller, and it’s funny, this happened to me in a couple of conversations I’ve had is I am usually being interviewed by someone who’s the pusher, I’m the puller. But anyway, on the puller, is someone who has no complaints. You load them up and they’re like, “Yep, I got it.” But they’re not asking for it. They’re not grabbing it. They’re not pushing, but they’re highly competent, they’re very organized, they’re very consistent, reliable and they have good judgment.
And you’re like, “I know that person won’t screw that up. I know that person will get the people to the party.” Whatever it is. And you just start loading them and they don’t renegotiate. They don’t know how to say no, and then they basically implode or explode.
Tim Ferriss: That’s what I’ve run into with past employees.
Claire Hughes Johnson: And I went through a period of my own development, I think of it as my martyr period where I literally, I don’t know who I thought I was martyring myself for, everyone else? I would be doing all this stuff for my colleagues, for my team. And I was like, “No one appreciates.” And I eventually had a really good open conversation with a guy, not my boss, who worked with me and he’s like, “Did I ask you to take that on? You just started running that project,” or, “You run our planning process.” Or, “Did someone ask you?” And I’m like, “Well, no. No one was doing it so I’m doing it.” He’s like, “And why do you feel like you have to do that?”
I was martyring myself for nothing. I think martyrs at least are celebrating like a God. I was sacrificing myself on the altar of someone didn’t do the work, so I’ll do it. It was very bad. And I was resenting the hell out of my colleagues.
Tim Ferriss: For sure.
Claire Hughes Johnson: I mean, this happens in relationships. It’s the “who’s going to take out the garbage” thing. But I designated myself the garbage collector for a whole set of things. Partly because I thought that was part of my job, but still it was not good. Anyway, the puller will implode slash explode and you might not be able to save them if it gets too far. So your job with them is like, “Let’s work on delegation skills. Let’s work on saying no. Let’s work on boundaries. Look at me. Let’s work on rules, boundaries.” How do you not be the person carrying everything and doing three jobs? And I think that once you know those two archetypes, you can look for the signs of them and then you can think, “Well, what’s their classic development area?” And then your job is to be all over them on that development area. They will collapse if you don’t get them to see that part of their job is to, the pusher especially — part of your job is to stop creating friction for everyone.
And for me, I really started to take exercise seriously when I decided it’s part of my job to be a better leader. I need to get a certain amount of exercise and now I will make time for it. And I think a lot of these types are like, “I’m going to do everything to win these pushers.” And you’re like, “Part of winning is avoiding a pyrrhic victory,” avoiding one where everyone wins but dies on the field. And they’re like, “Oh, well then how do I do that?” Because it doesn’t come naturally to them. And then they’ll say, “I don’t want to work with low performers.” And this is the problem. I mean, now we’re going deeper on this. They’re so good that you can’t quite say back to them, “No, those people are the same as you.”
So instead you’re like, “We all have different strengths and weaknesses. What I feel like you’re doing is not even appreciating what anyone else is bringing to the table. Why do you think that is?” And it’s like, “Well, they don’t stay up all night like I do, getting the thing done.” You’re like, “Nope, they don’t. And I actually don’t think sometimes you should stay up all night getting the thing done. But what do they do well?” And then you get them turned to think about assets and you’re like, “How can you use that asset to get the things done?” And they’re like, “Hmm…” But they really don’t think that way because it’s all on their own shoulders.
Tim Ferriss: Takes practice like so many things. Claire, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much. I’ve had so much fun. I’ve taken copious notes. I’m going to be following up on a million side quests as we call them, but important side quests. I’ve taken notes of phrasing that you’ve used, all sorts of things. So I am looking forward to actually digging into my homework. I’ll not stay up all night for the record. I’m trying to also health first, foundational along with the awareness, having the vehicle to do the things you want to do. Your book, which I highly recommend to folks, it’s incredibly tactical, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building. Tons of templates. Tons of frameworks. Lots of specifics that you can apply immediately. People can find you, correct me if I’m getting this wrong, but on Twitter @chughesjohnson — Let me try that again. I got a little Sean Connery. @chughesjohnson. We’ll link to LinkedIn as well. Are there any other websites or anything else that you’d like to point people to?
Claire Hughes Johnson: The Stripe Press website, you can find Scaling People and you can find actually, I did interviews with a bunch of leaders that there’s digital only content, which we can give you all the link to that.
Tim Ferriss: Beautiful.
Claire Hughes Johnson: But no, thank you, Tim. This has been wide-ranging as promised and stimulating, and I’ve got some recommendations I’m walking away with. So thank you.
Tim Ferriss: Thank you so much, Claire. And for everybody listening, we will link to everything in the show notes. This will be encyclopedic, and you can find that at tim.blog/podcast. And you just search for Claire, and this will pop right up and you’ll find everything that we discussed. And until next time, be a little bit kinder than is necessary, not only to others, but also to yourself. And as always, thanks for tuning in.
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