Matt Abrahams: Communication is operationalized leadership.
The best leaders communicate clearly and consistently.
My name is Matt Abrahams, and I teach Strategic Communication at
Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Welcome to this special episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast,
recorded live as part of Me2We, which is an on-campus component of Stanford
GSB's Executive Education LEAD program.
In front of over 500 people, I had the honor and privilege to host 4 of our
most popular guests in a thoughtful discussion of practical ideas and
tools we can all use to become better leaders and communicators.
It is now my distinct pleasure to host for you a live version
of Think Fast Talk Smart.
By way of quick introduction, we have Celine Teoh, Huggy Rao,
Tara VanDerveer, and Dave Dodson.
Thank you all for being here.
I'm excited to have our conversation.
We'll start with Celine.
Celine is a facilitator for the GSB's very famous class, Interpersonal
Dynamics, better known as Touchy Feely.
She is a coach and a lecturer in effective team leadership and a GSB graduate.
So Celine, it's really nice to see you again.
Celine and I will sometimes go for the walks in the foothills.
It's a little different in this format here.
As everyone here well knows, our world has become a bit more
divisive, and conversations can tend to be a little more conflictual.
What advice do you have for leaders to encourage differences of opinions
while trying to minimize the angst and conflict that can result?
Celine Teoh: I'm going to approach it from an interpersonal dynamics point of view.
And as a leader, if you want to encourage dissent, one of the first
things you have to do is ask for it.
I'm going to give you a framework.
It's the five A's.
You have to ask for it.
"Hey, what does everybody think? Does anybody have a different point of
view?" You have to acknowledge it.
"Oh, thank you for telling me that you think that this initiative might actually
reduce our budget and make us unable to meet our other goals." Appreciate it,
"I really enjoy that you told me this.
Thank you so much." Fourth is act on it.
As much as possible, act on it, right?
Put your money where your mouth is.
"Let's actually do an analysis to find out if there is enough money to hit
these goals." And then amplify it.
"Oh, Matt told me this thing. I really appreciate that he told me this thing
that I might initially have disagreed with." Because when you do something
like that, you actually create safety for people to dissent with you.
And then you asked a question around how do you minimize conflict when the
dissent does happen, and I would say, don't focus on the conflict itself.
Actually build the human relationship before that.
So ask for it, acknowledge it, appreciate, act on it, as much
as you can, and then amplify it
Matt Abrahams: Excellent.
What I notice is agree was not mandated to agree.
There isn't a sixth A. It's just to acknowledge and understand.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate that.
Sitting next to Celine is Huggy Rao.
Huggy is a professor in organizational behavior, and he teaches a lot of
popular classes, including People Operations From Startup to Scaleup.
And Huggy has written several books, but his most recent with Bob Sutton, who
also teaches at Stanford, is The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right
Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder.
So Huggy, when we last spoke, your book had just come out.
The Friction Project had just come out.
It's been a while now.
Can you share with all of us some things you learned when you were
bringing that book to the world, and what was most well-received?
Is there something that really helped people that you could share
with us that could help all of us?
Huggy Rao: I would say, uh, the idea or principle that had, uh, maximum
impact was what Bob and I refer to as the addition bias, the relentless
tendency of leaders, managers, and executives to constantly add.
Let me narrate a simple experiment.
So this was actually a series of 20 experiments.
So in the first experiment, they ask people, "Hey, you've got to
build a spaceship with Lego building blocks. Do you want 5 of them
or do you want 15 of them?" What do you think most people choose?
15. Arguably, it's way more complex to build a spaceship
with 15 blocks as opposed to 5.
In the second experimental task, they ask people, "Please plan a
vacation." And predictably, they add more cities to the vacation.
And the consequence is they feel they need to have a vacation from a vacation.
And we're sitting in a university, and that was the last of the 20 experiments.
"Please help us reform a university." 89% of the suggestions
had to do with addition.
What's the consequence of addition?
I could go on about how it destroys willpower and so forth.
Let me give you two quotes that have always stood with me.
One young woman with a tear in her eye told me, "I just
feel I can never be enough."
And that is tragic.
And American organizations psychologize this and say, "Oh my God, they have a
work-life balance issue. Let's give them a meditation app." The real problem is
the lousy way in which work is designed.
So the big takeaway from all of that is the implication for all of you as
leaders is to be editors in chief.
What does the editor-in-chief of a movie or a newspaper do?
They take out things that bore, bewilder, distract, and exhaust people.
And a good place to start is start with a campaign to get rid of stupid shit.
That's like a simple place to start.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you, Huggy, very much.
Sitting next to Huggy is Tara VanDerveer.
I am thrilled and honored that you decided to join us today.
Thank you.
Tara served as Stanford's head women's basketball coach for 38 years.
Tara led Stanford to 3 national championships.
She also coached the US national team to Olympic gold in 1996.
I've had the good fortune to get to know Tara over the last year or so.
Tara's very interested in learning and bringing learning to the
student athletes here on campus, and to the coaches as well.
You've been super busy since you retired.
I think maybe more busy than when you coached.
And Tara not only helps coach coaches, but she coaches leaders as well.
What do you find is one thing that you think is most helpful?
Tara VanDerveer: You know, the one thing I guess I want to communicate with the
young people I work with, whether it's the players or the coaches that I work
with, or now it's the other coaches of other teams, is just whenever I went to
the gym, I never felt like it was a job.
I loved going to the gym.
I loved being around the players that I worked with.
And I always wanted to help them be better.
And one of the things I did as an adult, does anyone play the piano here?
It is so hard, but I wanted to learn as an adult.
And I tried to teach myself for 2 weeks, and it was, like, hopeless.
And so I went out and I got the best piano teacher.
I mean, she's just phenomenal.
And within the first year I was making CDs and then another CDs.
And people said to me, "Wow, Tara, you're really good." I said, "No, I have
a great teacher." And what I took from that, and I hope to use with my coaching,
is I always want to help people get to somewhere they can't get by themselves.
So it's lifting them up and being positive and being encouraging and
helping them be the best they can be.
That's the thing I try to encourage, whether it's the players or coaches or
people that I have a chance to meet, is be someone that makes it better.
Be someone that makes a difference.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you very much.
David, this is David Dodson.
Dave is a lecturer in management.
He's also an alum.
He teaches Managing Growing Enterprises among his many other classes, and
his latest book is The Manager's Handbook: 5 Simple Steps to Build
a Team, Stay Focused, Make Better Decisions, and Crush Your Competition.
Dave, when you were on the podcast before, it was a master class in how to lead
and how to really be a better manager.
Since we last met, it feels like so much has changed in the world.
We met before the AI revolution and other things.
If you were to update your manager's handbook today based on the
challenges leaders are facing, what one bit of advice would you add?
David Dodson: I've thought about that a lot.
I don't see how two things can coexist right now, which is that AI has all
of the description and promise, and there won't be a lot of job disruption.
I know some people say that's not the case, but I don't believe that.
And the reason I don't believe that is because AI is by definition doing
things that people did or people do now.
That's gonna lead to disruption.
I didn't necessarily say it's gonna be bad.
I have no idea how it's gonna turn out.
Anyone who says they know are fooling themselves, but I do
know there's gonna be disruption.
And Warren Buffett has that great expression, I assume he coined it, "When
the tide comes down, you see the rocks." I think that's what's gonna happen,
is I think the tide is gonna come down because the whole idea or the whole
sweepstakes of who's a winner and who's a loser is gonna be turned on its head.
And you're not going to win because you have better technology.
45 years ago I was programming in Fortran, and I could figure
out how to draw a Christmas tree in a dot matrix printer, right?
And then I haven't programmed since then.
Everyone here can program now.
We're all programmers now.
So technology is becoming less and less important, and what's ending up happening
is running things well is going to become more and more important because
you can't cover it up with the things that you used to be able to cover up.
So I don't think there's ever gonna be a more important time than to go back to the
fundamentals of how do you build a team?
What are the sub-skills of building a team?
How do you go get advice?
How do you measure quality?
And so all those fundamentals I think are going to rise because the technology
advantage is gonna come down, and there's going to be a lot of disruption.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you to all of you.
It was nice to hear your voices and your input.
The theme of this year's Me2We is leadership, and I'd like to ask each
of you to share one of the best bits of leadership advice you've learned or
experienced in your careers that you think would benefit those folks in the room.
Dave, since we just heard from you, let's have you start again.
What's one of the best bits of advice?
David Dodson: So my career after I got out of business school was I worked
here at the business school, and then I went out and bought a small company.
And that small company, the largest investor was TA Associates,
which was very small at the time.
Now they're huge.
So I got access to the guy who was running the whole place, Kevin Landry.
He's since passed away.
And he told me this.
He said, "The hardest step that you make is not becoming a manager because
once you become a manager and you've got three or four people reporting to you,
you can do their work on the weekends, you can cover up for them or whatever.
The hard thing is when you become a manager of managers because then
you can't cheat basically the system anymore." And he said, "That's what we're
gonna see whether you can do or not." And so as a result of that, I've over
time evolved to the comparison between being a leader and being a teacher.
And it's not because I teach at the business school.
I'm, it's in a different context, is that the best leaders are the
ones that are focused on teaching and developing talent and not doing.
So that would be the single nugget that I wanted to share.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you for that.
And one of the hardest lessons I ever had to learn when I was an operator was
exactly that 'cause I wanted everybody to like me, so I did all the work
myself, and I didn't take that step back.
So Tara, let's move to you.
What's some advice that you would share here about good
leadership that you've learned?
Tara VanDerveer: I was a, a head coach before I was at Stanford, and I was in
a situation where, you know, we had a championship team, we had great recruits,
we had, I had a great staff, but I didn't feel appreciated from maybe the
leadership of the athletic department.
And so I started looking around, and then I got recruited by Stanford.
So I took the job at Stanford, and then we've had great success at Stanford.
And Stanford at the time was not a very good program.
But I think more than anything, I learned that as a leader, as the head coach, you
know, whether it's I wanted to be a great teacher, but I wanted to make sure that
the people I worked with felt appreciated.
And a, a lot of people, I think, change their jobs, not because they don't like
the job, but because they don't like who they're working for, and they don't feel
the respect or they don't feel the part of the, the process that they want to feel.
And I felt it, and so I want to make sure that the people that I
work with, my assistant coaches, my staff, feel appreciated.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you.
Take the time to appreciate.
Very good.
Huggy, how about some leadership advice you've experienced
or you'd like to pass on?
Huggy Rao: I love history.
And for me, the advice, I guess, that had the most impact on me, that in part
informed our Friction Project book, was the advice, uh, Augustus Caesar, the great
Roman emperor, would give to his generals.
He would always tell them, "Make haste slowly." And that's
been worked and reworked.
I think the great danger with speed is good people can do very
bad things very quickly, and that's the problem with speed.
One quick study, I asked my PhD student, "Here's a bunch of Bay Area startups. Use
a large language model to comb through all their strategy documents. Tell me
how much do they linguistically emphasize speed?" She came up with a number.
I said, "Tell me what's the relationship between this linguistic emphasis on speed
and the time taken to become a unicorn?" And she was excited, and she said,
"Oh my God, the more they talked about speed, the faster they became a unicorn."
I said, "Wait a minute." I said, "Conditional on the first stage, do
a second stage analysis and tell me the relationship between the time
taken to become a unicorn and the probability of lawsuits two years
down the line." What did she find?
Faster you became a unicorn, you got barraged with lawsuit.
So to me, the most important thing I think is to create, for all of
you as leaders, cognitive speed bumps to slow your people down.
Because if you don't do that, they're going to, of course, rush in and make
mistakes and also do many bad things.
So a simple technique is to always say, "What would we do if we had
half the resources we have? What would we do if we have quarter the
resources we have?" And just the thought experiment slows you down.
Matt Abrahams: Excellent.
Thank you very much.
Slow things down and build in some friction.
Celine, how about you?
What's some leadership advice you have for folks?
Celine Teoh: So I actually went out and asked my coachees this.
So I'm going to pass on to you wisdom from all of these leaders of fairly
large and successful organizations.
And every single one of them had the same advice, which was listen more.
And that's because, as you all know, everybody in here is a leader.
The more senior you get, the taller, funnier, better looking you become.
Nobody wants to say no to you.
Nobody wants to tell you bad news.
You stop hearing the stuff you need to hear in order to make good decisions.
And so answer to the first question, ask, and then do what one of
these leaders is actually doing.
He's having the situation where he's retiring, and he's grooming the successor,
and the successor he noticed, like, jumps in and states her opinion right away
the instant she gets into the meeting.
And what that does is that narrows the conversation.
Suddenly everybody's just supporting her perspective.
And so the advice that he gave her was, "Be the last one to speak.
Let the junior people speak first, and then don't shoot them down.
But let them all speak first, and then you'll suddenly
hear a diversity of opinions.
And then when they speak, listen very hard." Because when they say, "Celine,
perhaps that might not possibly be the best idea on the table," what they really
mean is, "Celine, that idea sucks." So you have to listen, You have to kind
of like amp up what they're saying.
So listen hard.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you all for that.
And I'd love just very quickly to hear from some of you before
I get to our final question.
If you have thoughts on what helps improve communication.
And Huggy, I'm gonna pick on you because you said something, I
don't know that it's yours, but you talked about jargon monoxide.
Can you talk about how that suffocates communication?
Huggy Rao: I think it kills communication.
We have a chapter in our book about jargon monoxide, and that's using
hugely complicated words and language that frankly alienates people.
In fact, the more abstractions you invoke, the more confused you leave people.
Look at all the companies, they say integrity is a value.
I get confused by that.
What does that mean?
Does it mean I tell you the truth even before you ask me or do I tell
you the truth only when you ask me?
And there's actually a very interesting study that shows the
more abstract and jargon-laden the language we use, people actually
associate those words with the mouth.
And when you use concrete words and language, people
associate that with the hand.
And so every time you're talking to somebody, ask yourself what's
the ratio of hand to mouth word?
And once you do that, you quickly realize, I've got to purge a lot of these
mouth words, abstractions that simply signal you have mastered presumably
something, but leave everybody mystified.
And you don't have agreement then.
You actually have people sleepwalking to conclusions of
which they're completely unaware of.
Matt Abrahams: I need to get my foot out of my mouth most of the time, so maybe
that leads me into more of my hands.
Thank you.
Tara, when you and I spoke, I was really fascinated by how you think about giving
constructive feedback to your players.
If you think about it, a coach's job is to coach and to give that feedback.
In terms of your communication when you're in a moment of giving
feedback, can you share a little bit about how you approach that?
Tara VanDerveer: Well, I think feedback is coaching.
Sometimes it's hard for people to hear feedback.
The very first person I coached was my sister Marie, who never practiced.
My dad made me coach her team, and Marie never practiced, but I always knew that I
had a great relationship with my sister.
So the first thing I would start with when I'm coaching someone is the
relationship that I have with them.
So maybe a senior on the team who I know and know really well, I
might be able to communicate in a different way than a freshman.
So it's first the communication is based on the relationship that
you have with the person you're talking with or giving feedback.
And then no matter what, I would sandwich the communication with positive.
If someone, you know, is not getting back on defense, I said, "Wow, you're
doing a, a great job on the offensive boards, but you're not sprinting back
on defense, and we need you out there." So it would be positive of, you know,
you're doing a great job, let's do this better, and then another great job.
So I call it, you know, the sandwich approach to coaching.
And after every game, we would give our team very specific written
feedback of things you are doing well and then a thing you can do better.
And just maybe some of it is not what you're saying, but
how you're saying it to them.
I think of coaching, and leading is, I think, is really similar in that
how would you like to be coached?
And I talk to our assistant coaches of being the coach that you want to play for.
So be the boss, be the leader that you would like to learn from or work for.
And a lot of that is not always what you say, but how you say it.
And who wants to be screamed at?
You know, I mean, really, who wants to be screamed at and yelled at and,
and in some ways being broken down?
And so I, I would never use that way of coaching.
Matt Abrahams: So it's really taking the time to think about what's relevant
and important for the person you're talking to, and to remind them that
you're here to also encourage them.
Celine, I know that when you and I have talked, that you believe that
it's important to prepare when you have significant high-stakes communication.
Do you have some suggestions about how people can best prepare?
Celine Teoh: A lot of the advice around communication that I consume
revolves around the form of it.
But I think what's important to prepare is just knowing your audience.
Sit there and actually get into their shoes, get into their personalities,
get into their personas, and really understand what is it they care about.
What message will resonate with them?
I think real empathy for your audience is where I would start.
Matt Abrahams: So as you prepare, it's not about getting the message out, it's
about making sure the message lands.
Thank you.
So Dave, in your book, it's full of good communication advice.
Is there one thing that stands out to you that you would share that really
helps with successful communication?
David Dodson: Here would be the advice that is actually through a lot of the
communication aspects of the book, which is that you start with having a framework.
Tara was talking about giving feedback, and how we teach feedback
is that it's, there's 6 parts.
I'm not going to go through the 6 parts.
It's in the book.
But that you learn these 6 parts because you have to ask them for, for example,
if they're facing any obstacles.
You have to be clear how you're measuring them.
You have to be clear that you're giving them support.
And if you learn those basics, those 6 steps, and it's all conversational in
the end, then you give great feedback.
Another framework we have is when you're giving bad news.
A lot of people give bad news and they ramble on and go back and
forth and nobody really knows what's happening and they're apologizing.
Just do it like this.
Just say this.
"This is what happened.
This is the implication.
This is what I learned from it.
This is what I'm doing differently going forward." Structure
your communication like that.
It'll be conversational, but have structure around
it so that you cover that.
So that's really done more for me than anything in terms of being
able to communicate effectively.
Matt Abrahams: Structure is so critical to effect it.
It helps you and it helps your audience.
Thank you.
So I'm going to ask one final question of each panelist.
What is one skill or tool you would suggest our leaders consider, develop, or
hone as they walk into 2026 and beyond?
What's one skill?
Tara, do you mind sharing one first?
Tara VanDerveer: Again, this might sound a little odd, but I think you want to start
with yourself and take care of yourself.
You want to make sure that you're getting the sleep that you need, that
you're getting your exercise and doing things that are making you healthy.
And then I think you're going to be a much better leader for people that
you feel really good about yourself.
And you can have a great job, and you can work really hard, but you still have time
for your friends and your family and your children and taking care of yourself.
So I think it really, it starts with you and being able to look in the
mirror every day when most of you brush your teeth every day, I think.
And it starts with how you approach it, your attitude, and
how you put yourself together.
And I work with so many people and a lot of young people
that they're so distracted.
They're on their phones for hours and hours.
And that's, I would also say that is get off your phones
and take time for yourself.
Matt Abrahams: Okay, so it starts with you first.
Dave, how about something you would suggest?
David Dodson: It might be a little less obvious, but it really builds on
something, Tara, you were just saying, which is make sure you have time to think.
And I was thinking about, especially when you talk about being on the
phones and so forth, I mean, we're just bombarded with stimulus.
And so my leadership advice would be being able to do deep work and being able
to think creatively and then creating an environment where the people that
work for you also have that instead of everybody just pounding through emails
all day long and trying to multitask on Zoom and every, just take time to think.
That's where the big lightning flashes of brilliance come from.
Matt Abrahams: So give yourself the time to think and set up that environment.
Celine, how about you?
What's one skill or idea you'd like folks to hone?
Celine Teoh: I'm actually thinking about something you said, Huggy,
which was the mouth and the hands.
I think we should think about the skill of bringing your
head and your heart into work.
Because in a realm of AI nowadays, what Dave was talking about, what is
left to us when the AI is smarter, more logical, knows more than we
do, if not our magnificent humanity?
And that is our ability to feel, our team's ability to feel.
And so I would say learn to name your feelings, right?
When you're, as Tara recommends, brushing your teeth in front of the
mirror or washing your hands and ask yourself, "What am I feeling right now?
What's one sentence as to why?" And then do that with your team.
Ask your team, you know, a quick check-in at the beginning of the meeting.
David Bradford actually recommended this as the highest ROI move he can think of.
How are you feeling right now?
What's one feeling word?
What's one sentence as to why?
And then go around the table, takes 5 minutes, and then suddenly
you realize, oh, there's a lot of heavy stuff happening over here.
There's a lot of light stuff happening over there.
It's all in the room with you, so head and heart.
Matt Abrahams: Huggy, how about you?
What's one thing you would recommend that people consider?
Huggy Rao: Yeah, um, I'd be glad to do that, Matt.
But before I do that, I really want to double-click on what Tara and
David just mentioned, and that is time poverty always leads to thought poverty.
You don't have time, you're not going to have great thoughts, period, you know?
So here's a story.
I'm gonna take you back to the Greece of Homer.
Many of you may recall Ulysses, who of course was described
by Homer in his books.
This story is about Ulysses, and Ulysses has fought all of these battles, and
he's tired, and he's trying to return home to meet his wife, Penelope.
And as the ship is sailing, there's actually a huge temptation close,
and that's the island of the Siren, mythical demigods, if you
will, who sing haunting songs.
And if you went to the island, you could get trapped.
And Ulysses had a problem.
He wanted to listen to the music but not get trapped because otherwise
he wouldn't be able to see Penelope.
And the tactic that Ulysses, or tool that Ulysses relies on is he tells
his sailors, "Please tie me to a mast and stuff my mouth with cotton because
I cannot give you instructions to stop and stay here in this island.
But leave my ears open so I can listen to the music." And then he tells the sailors,
"You need to stuff your ears with wax because you can't listen to the music lest
you actually get trapped in that island."
And this is actually a simple story but for me a very
powerful one about weak will.
I wish I was a resolute chooser, but I know I have weak will.
And so the tool for all of you is to ask yourselves what's your mast?
For me, my mast is I'm a morning person.
I get up at 4:30 or whatever it is.
4:30 until 12:00 I'm supremely data oriented, very rational.
After 12:00 I make fast decisions, most of which are wrong.
And so my mast is I never make an important decision after
12 o'clock in the afternoon.
So that's my mast.
So think about what's your mast.
Matt Abrahams: Thank you.
My one bit of advice, celebrate the failures.
Understanding the failures can really teach a lot as well
as, as celebrating the wins.
I think that's a great way for us to wrap up.
Thank you so much for being here.
I want to thank the panel.
Can you please join me in giving a big round of applause for our panelists today?
Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think
Fast Talk Smart, the podcast.
To hear the 2025 version of our live Me2We event, please listen to episode 194.
This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams.
Our music is from Floyd Wonder, with special thanks to Podium Podcast Company.
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