She met Yosi downstairs at 11:45, and he was there as always, perfectly on time. He led the way, as ever not asking where she wanted to eat.
She peeled off lunch suspects as they walked the blocks, until she was sure where they were going. Flock. A hip, tiny bistro hidden in the middle of warehouses, run by a husband-and-wife team.
They passed the stone lions that stood on each side of the gate, and walked through the dining patio. There were heat lamps, though not turned on, and blankets folded neatly on the seats. The patio was empty. Even though it was September, this day was foggy and bitterly cold. Only if Flock was completely packed would anyone willingly crawl under a blanket outside.
Allie stepped into the restaurant and into the warmth and smell of onions caramelizing and polenta simmering. The owner came up and gave Yosi a huge hug.
“How are you?”
“Good, good! And how is the baby?”
“Walking! It’s terrifying,” she replied.
“Yep! I remember well!” They chatted conspiratorially as they wound between glass and wooden tables.
Their table was up against a floor-to-ceiling window. The window radiated cold, but the heat of the room made up for it.
Yosi took his napkin and gave it a dramatic flap to open it, then placed it on his lap. The server was at his side immediately. He ordered the fish special, and Allie got a salad.
“Omega Threes!” he announced. “I do feel like being a little bad today. I’ll have a beer.”
Allie was surprised, but happily ordered the same.
“One beer is pleasant, two makes for napping.” He smiled at her. “But no one to judge us here!”
Allie looked around. She didn’t see a single coworker. There were some businessmen, mostly over fifty, and a few people who looked like they worked at the design center, very chic and well dressed. Suddenly she saw the appeal of the place—it was an SOS-free zone. She felt oddly light then, as if the weight of eyes had been removed from her. Sometimes she missed cubes with walls high enough you didn’t have to feel like someone was always watching over your shoulder. But of course, she worked at a game company, so when a game was on her screen, she could hardly be judged for spending her time poorly.
Allie slid back into her chair, reveling in the moment of peace. “Okay, lay it on me.”
“I promised I would.” The beer arrived. Yosi took a long sip, acquiring a foam mustache. He wiped it away and sighed.
“This is Rick’s third company, but my first as CTO. We’d worked together at his first, DexTalk, but I left after the first year. I got a terrific offer from IBM and honestly, my wife was not into the startup life of all work and no money. And I can’t complain! Sure, there was some money when DexTalk sold, but I had a great salary and was able to save up. When Rick approached me about SOS, we were in a much better place financially, and Rick now had a track record of solid exits. This time his dream is to go IPO.”
Everyone knew that.
“It was great when we started. I got to build amazing things, play with different frameworks, and I only hired people who could outcode me. But that didn’t last. When Baccarat took off, suddenly we had to scale. Rick and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on that. He brought in Chuck then.”
Chuck was CTO now, but had started as Yosi’s VP of engineering.
“Honestly, I was relieved. I loved to code, I hated to hire, and I hated talking to my team about anything other than the code even more. I believed my job was to create world-class architecture and the code to run on it. So I was delighted to hand over the people stuff to Chuck. I just worked on the code. QuiltWorld runs on my original architecture designs.” He beamed with pride. “And look how it’s scaled! And Baccarat is still rock solid.”
All true.
“But Chuck didn’t have my vision. He even hired people I had given a thumbs-down to. But he’d place them in new studios, like NoirWorld.”
NoirWorld was notoriously buggy. People bet on which would crash first, their numbers or their game. But it still had enough high spending whales to warrant keeping it running.
“And then I made a deadly error. The sin of pride, maybe. I disparaged Chuck in front of the board.”
Allie hadn’t even touched her beer. This was the apocryphal story, of how Yosi embarrassed Rick.
Yosi started picking away at the beer label where it had begun to peel off from moisture. “I never got NoirWorld. Not the concept and certainly not how it was built, thrown together overnight with duct tape and string. But it grew like a weed. It had promise beyond the casino games. Rick believed it was the beginning of exponential growth. And I undermined it in front of investors.” He shook his head at his own hubris. “And then I wasn’t CTO. Rick told me himself. He does his own dirty work. He moved me into R&D, and told me to build platforms for new games, so we could scale faster. And I kept my stock, so,” he shrugged. “But it was a new department. I had to learn how to build a team. I knew how to hire, but I also knew I was missing something. I didn’t know how to pull people into a unit to work together.” He pulled the label off the beer and smoothed it on the table.
Allie reached for her forgotten beer. She had never been at the receiving end of a Rick tongue lashing, but they were legendary.
“I was lucky. My wife was finding me increasingly unpleasant. She talked me into taking Com-19 at Stanford, the T-group. Have you heard of it?”
Allie shook her head slowly, no.
“It’s a spinoff from the GSP interpersonal dynamics course.” He grinned. “Touchy-feely. We spend four days sitting in a circle and talking. We learn to give feedback, to see ourselves as others see ourselves.” Now he shook his head ruefully. “I found out I was an asshole. Yes, probably not news to you, but news to me. It’s part of my culture. Israelis are much more straightforward than Californians.”
Allie snorted. “That’s an understatement!”
Yosi guffawed. “You are passive aggressive nice-niks.”
“You think arguing is a sport! You do it even when you agree with me!”
“Ha! True. But you aren’t too bad. You say what you think sometimes.” He tipped his bottle toward her, and they clinked.
The lunch came. They took a moment to settle into the food. Yosi’s fish looked amazing—picked yesterday, cooked to perfection. Allie, feeling a bit more relaxed from the beer and regretting her wholesome salad, ordered some fried mushrooms as well.
“Anyhow, T-groups changed me. But they also drove me crazy. All I could remember was sitting around talking to people. And I didn’t remember the facilitators doing anything special in particular. Or anything! They seemed to just sit there, or gently remind people ‘Feedback is about behavior.’ There were a few frameworks they taught us, such as a sort of useful one on relationship types,” he waved his fork in the air as if to dismiss it, “and a better one for giving feedback.”
Allie silently noted she wanted these frameworks.
“But I couldn’t figure out how I’d had so many meaningful conversations. I’d walked in seeing twelve strangers as assholes. . . .”
Allie raised an eyebrow, and Yosi shrugged.
“. . . You know, the guy who is too old to be a hipster but still tries, the kiss-up guy who agrees with anything someone says, the soccer mom . . .”
Allie stiffened.
“No, no, I’m saying that’s how I saw them when I first walked in, a bunch of stereotypes I was trapped with for a weekend. But by the end of the weekend, they were all people.” He emphasized the last word, as if it were a special title, like king or queen. “And I couldn’t see how it was done. It was like a magic trick. So I contacted one of the facilitators and he referred me to a coach.” Yosi spread his hands wide, as if to say, there you go!
Allie took a bit of salad, waiting to see if he’d continue. But he began eating his fish.
“And your coach . . . ?” she finally prompted.
“Ed helped me see that my job was not to be first among equals. My job was to be a coach to the best people I could find. To help them reach their potential, so the company can thrive. I had to become a servant leader.”
He took another bite and then chewed furiously and swallowed hard, as if gripped by an idea he couldn’t wait to get out. He waved his fork at her. “You know what’s messed up about companies?”
“That’s a long list.”
“No, I mean yes, but this is also what’s messed up about people! No one likes conflict!”
Another bite, more chewing. Allie waited. She contemplated another beer.
“So we don’t give anyone feedback on what they’re doing wrong. And then once a year we do annual performance reviews, and all the stuff we have been sitting on, all that resentment, we bundle it up and dump it on some poor schlub’s head! And then he’s gobsmacked, has a nervous breakdown for a week, and the manager feels guilty and is extra-nice, or worse, avoids him, and there we are!”
“What’s the alternative?” Everyone did annuals. Every place she’d worked at, anyhow.
“Continuous feedback.” Yosi paused dramatically. “When an employee acts in a way that will make him less successful, we must give that feedback instantly. You see, two things are going wrong with the annual review. One,” he held up a thumb, in the European manner, “no one remembers what happened six or nine months ago. An ‘annual’ review,’” and here he did scare quotes around “annual,” “is really only a quarter of a review, unless something dreadful enough to be memorable happened. And if it was that dreadful, the manager probably addressed it then, and it’s just opening up old wounds.”
Allie nodded. “But that’s why we do quarterly reviews here, I thought.”
“Yes, that was my idea,” Yosi said. “Rick still listens to me. He just won’t let me near anyone important I might insult.” He smiled. “We do quarterly reviews, and that helps a bit. But not enough. That’s the second thing wrong with formal reviews. It’s too much feedback. It’s overwhelming.” Now he opened his hands wide, in a gesture of a reveal. “If you hear one thing when it happens, you can really hear it and change. If you hear twenty things you get overwhelmed. You’ll probably just work on one or two. In fact, three!” Now he held up three fingers. “You are so worried about your raise, you probably are hardly listening at all, anyway. We get flooded emotionally, and then listening is too hard.”
Allie nodded again. She remembered a horrible review she’d had at one of her first jobs. Her boss droned on and on about everything she’d done wrong, and she had to force herself to nod while he talked, unable to hear anything, just drowning in her misery. In the end, he’d given her a raise anyhow. The standard annual amount, but why he had spent thirty minutes telling her everything that was wrong with her, she would never know.
When she reviewed her guys, she tried to give feedback the way she’d heard to do, say a nice thing, then a thing they did wrong, then another nice thing. She couldn’t imagine ever cutting someone down for thirty minutes. “So why are we still doing quarterly reviews?”
“Quarterly reviews are like retrospective, or grading OKRs. They are a formal closing, a chance to reflect. When matched with regular feedback, they can increase organizational learning.” Yosi looked at his watch. “We’re good for a bit longer.”
Allie saw her moment. “I’d like to ask your advice.”
“Shoot.”
“I need to put Mick on a PIP.”
Yosi nodded. “I wondered.”
“He’s an okay data analyst, but he’s a terrible PM. And the team hates working with him. I just wish it didn’t take so long to fire someone.”
Now Yosi shook his head sorrowfully. “First, you have to change your thinking. There are no bad employees. There are employees who don’t know things yet. And there are employees who resist change, but don’t know that they are losing power and influence because of their behavior. They conflate behavior with identity. And there are employees who are a bad fit. This last one is very difficult.”
“Please continue, Yoda. Wise, you are.”
At this Yosi chortled. “I’m starting to look like him! New wrinkles every day!” He took a sip of his drink. “It’s not about firing, it’s about giving clear feedback. And then making sure that there are consequences to a person’s behavior if they choose to ignore the feedback.”
Allie shrugged. It was all a bit melodramatic, but not out of keeping with Rob and Derek’s advice.
“Let’s start by asking why would we ever want feedback? When someone tells you, ‘I’ve got some feedback for you,’ how do you feel?”
Allie rolled her eyes. “Here comes trouble.”
“Exactly. Most people use feedback as a way to tell you what they don’t like about you. But you know what? It’s still information. It’s a single data point, but it’s a data point.”
“Not statistically significant.”
“Yes, but it’s more like a playtest. Playtests are not statistically significant most of the time, as we only test with eight or ten folks at a time. But we start to see the game through their eyes, and gain insights that we can use to make the game better.”
Allie nodded.
“So feedback is like that. You can get some information on how you are seen, and you can decide what to do with it. It’s a clue to what might be holding you back.”
The mushrooms arrived, hot and fragrant fried morsels of delight, with an aioli dipping sauce. Yosi stopped talking to pop one in his mouth. “Ow, hot, hot, hot.” He blew past the mushroom, trying to cool it in his mouth.
“I think I’ll wait a sec.” Allie grinned. “Okay, so I should seek feedback, got it, but most employees don’t want it still. Should I try to convince them they should like it?”
“Depends what kind of feedback it is. The simplest format for feedback is behavior, reaction, consequence. ‘You did this thing’—something that is observable, that is not a matter of opinion. ‘You’re an asshole’ is an opinion. ‘You’re trying to mess with me’ is also an opinion, because it speaks to intent. You can’t know what someone is thinking. You can only know what you can observe. But keeping to what you can observe, people will feel less judged, less misunderstood. And they can’t argue. They may have done something in order to mess with you, but they can deny it and there is no winning that argument. But if they did something that did mess you up, well, there it is. Observable facts.”
“Ugh, hypotheticals. I’m already lost.”
“Okay, well, in the last estaff, you were suggesting a success metric for the new game, and Brent interrupted you. Talked on top of you.”
Allie’s lips tightened. That had really pissed her off. She was still mad.
“So did you talk to him about it?”
“No. I didn’t know what to say.”
“What did you think of saying?”
“You mean after I thought, ‘Asshat’?’”
“You didn’t say that, and that’s good because that is judging, and no one enjoys being judged.”
Allie thought, It’s not judging, it’s observing the obvious. She snarked, “Figured that out on my own.”
Yosi waved his hands in the air, So sue me.
“Okay,” Allie put a mushroom on her plate to cool off. “I figured he wouldn’t like it if I told him he was mansplaining me. Which he was. How long have I been doing game metrics? But what could I say? ‘Please don’t interrupt me?’ He probably didn’t even realize he did it. Half the time the GMs just talk on top of each other.”
“That’s where the other two parts of feedback come in handy. You might say, ‘Brent, when you interrupted me in the meeting, I felt hurt. I’m worried you don’t respect my thinking, and that would make it hard for me to work with you effectively.’”
“So many things wrong with saying that,” Allie replied. She poked the mushroom with a finger. It was warm, but not too hot. She dipped it in the aoili and bit in. OMG, such deliciousness! Her hackles went down a bit.
Yosi looked puzzled. “Like?”
“I’m not going to say I feel hurt to Brent. He’s one of the wolves. He’ll classify me down as a weak female. Which means he’ll either dismiss me or attack.”
“Okay, fair enough. But some other feeling? You look angry?”
“Sure, I’ll just say, ‘Brent, when you interrupted me, I was really pissed off.’” She tilted her head to the side. “Actually that might work. It’s his language.”
“And the rest?” Yosi asked.
“Maybe it’s the same, it’s that touchy-feely language that is not going to fly at SOS. How about, ‘Brent, when you interrupted me, I was pissed off. I felt disrespected, and that makes it hard for me to want to work with you.’ That should scare him. He needs QuiltWorld traffic.”
“In interpersonal dynamics training, we try not to use phrases like ‘I felt disrespected’ and reserve the word ‘feel’ for actual feelings.”
“Yosi, this is useful, but don’t be so dogmatic. I haven’t gotten this far without speaking the language of this place.”
“I havebeen very effective with this ‘touchy-feely’ language.”
“I’m not you.” Allie was growing angry again.
“All right,” he replied, his eyes scanning her face. “I respect your experience is not mine. Let’s talk about consequences. If people don’t see how refusing to change hurts them, they’re not going to go through the hassle of changing.”
Allie appreciated he was listening to her, not dismissing her feelings, like George always had. George never got that she had to be tougher, work harder just to be seen as equal. But Yosi acknowledged her history. She felt safer, and nodded to him to go on. “Makes sense. Okay, so you were talking about types of problem employees?”
The busser cleared their plates, and Yosi ordered an espresso. Allie gleefully followed his lead. Great, more time to learn.
“Oh, yes. Don’t know, don’t want, can’t. Okay, so if you never give feedback, people don’t realize what they are doing that could be holding them back. Have you ever told Kendra it drives you crazy that she never gets her work in on time?”
It was true, Kendra was always late. But why weren’t they talking about Mick? Allie replied, “I just add twenty-four hours to her estimates now.”
“When you do that, she doesn’t learn that her procrastinating is hurting her career. You don’t think of her as reliable, right?”
“Not even a little. A few times she’s gotten the team her designs two or three days late. But her work is always excellent.”
“You like her and you like her work, but her next boss may not put up with that, and fire her. You are keeping information from her that could hurt her career. Do you think she’d like to get promoted, lead a game?”
“Yes.”
“So. She is a ‘don’t know.’ She thinks being late is acceptable because you have made it so. It would have been easy when she was late the first time to tell her it wasn’t okay. Now you’ll have to have a longer discussion with her about why it’s no longer okay. Or you can pass the problem off to her next boss. Who may not give her feedback either, until he fires her.”
“I’m not passing off problems. That’s not who I want to be.”
“Good. So when you get back to the office, you’ll talk to Kendra.”
Allie took a very big breath, and blew it out. So many conversations.
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
“She could get upset. But she won’t. When she knows she’s fucking up, she apologizes every time. She just doesn’t change.”
“Can you think of the last three times it’s happened?”
“Yes.”
“And were there consequences because of her actions?”
“Oh, yes. Not only that I can’t trust her to get critical work done, but she did cause us to miss a launch window. I can probably put a number to that.” A week of revenue.
“Okay, now let’s go through my guys. I know what I think of them. What do you think? Can you give me a keep and change for each one?”
“Keep and change?”
“Sorry, that’s my shorthand. Something that’s beneficial, that they should keep doing. And something that is hurting their ability to be effective and have influence. Something that they should change, or stop doing.”
Allie went through her pods easily. Then she slowed down as she started considering the engineers in other pods. When it came to the ops crew, she realized there was a guy whose name she didn’t even know. He was new, but not that new. She was chagrined.
Yosi shook his head. “You’re not a PM anymore. You’re responsible for everyone. You need to constantly collect feedback. And constantly give it.”
She had to agree. “Okay, you said awareness is the first step. But Kendra knows she’s always late.”
“She doesn’t know it matters. Or she doesn’t know how much it matters. That’s the second part. We all have quirks. Some are innocuous, but some get in the way of your ability to be effective. Like my accent. When I first got here, people struggled to understand me. But now it’s just part of my charm.” He winked. “Because you keep letting Kendra get away with being late, you’ve given her a message it’s okay. That’s why I suggested you make it clear to her what the consequences are, both in your perception of her and in the world’s perception. An observation without consequences is just a fun fact.”
“Okay, let’s say she doesn’t change. She refuses, or maybe she just can’t?”
“Do you need to know when work will be done? Are you able to estimate how long it takes her to do things?”
“Oh, yes. For so many reasons, yes.” Allie had to know how long it took to get work done. After they missed a launch, she padded her timelines with Kendra, and even lied to her about due dates.
“If she doesn’t change, you escalate the consequences. You put her on a PIP.”
“What do you mean?” Allie was a bit shocked by this escalation.
“Say, ‘Unfortunately, Kendra, your lateness problem hasn’t changed, and it’s causing the studio a lot of problems. While I appreciate the quality of your work, this can’t continue. I’d like you to consider if you are willing to commit to change, if you believe that you can. If you can, I can commit to you. But we need to document it via a PIP. If you think you can’t commit to this change, I don’t think this is the right place for you.’”
The “not the right place for you” line was such HR talk. But Allie liked the idea that if someone committed to her, she could commit to helping them change.
“Okay. I’m going to give it a shot.”
“Great! And SOS can pick up this bill. We’ve done nothing but work!”
When do we do anything else? thought Allie. This is who we are.