When an executive decides not to confront a peer about a potential disagreement, he or she is dooming employees to waste time, money, and emotional energy dealing with unresolvable issues. This causes the best employees to start looking for jobs in less dysfunctional organizations, and it creates an environment of disillusionment, distrust, and... See more

Every day I stayed silent, the situation got worse. The market was wrong. The mission was wrong. We were wrong for each other.

After giving contextual advice to thousands of founders, here is the one thing I wish everyone understood:

The longer you avoid the truth, the worse the price gets.

It does not stay still. It compounds.

Waiting to say the hard... See more

5.  Be Direct and  Respect Your Colleagues, which I find as the company grows— one of my colleagues, Boz, has this saying that we’re in  danger of nicing ourselves to death.  And Sheryl always says  that the amount of progress that we make is directly proportional to the number of hard conversations that we’re  willing to have.

When bosses are too invested in everyone getting along they also fail to encourage the people on their team to criticize one another other for fear of sowing discord. They create the kind of work environment where being "nice" is prioritized at the expense of critiquing and therefore improving actual performance.

over time, hopeful silence has corrosive effects. If you don’t name the real problems in your life, you eventually become alienated from your inner compass. You stop paying attention to your life on an experiential level, because you want to live in a pretend world of self-consolation. You lose the ability to see your life honestly.

Sometimes, I... See more