One idea, one quote, one question. 90 seconds.
The Idea
When Amy Edmondson was a graduate student at Harvard, she studied teamwork in hospitals and expected better-led teams to have fewer errors. The data showed the opposite: teams with stronger leadership and better relationships appeared to have more errors. She checked whether their patients were sicker. The pattern held.
Her explanation was that openness made errors easier to report and discuss, while mistakes could go unreported in teams with punitive leaders. A low error count could leave a leader with an incomplete picture of what was happening.
That finding is what makes Daniel Lubetzky’s approach on the podcast this week so practical. Daniel founded KIND Snacks, and when I asked him about building a culture where people feel safe challenging him, he said it’s much easier to say you welcome feedback than to actually hear what you’re doing wrong. His suggestion: if someone thoughtfully challenges your approach in a meeting, thank them before the meeting ends, even if you disagree. How you respond in that moment shapes whether they raise the next concern. Before taking a quiet meeting as a sign of agreement, consider what happened the last time someone spoke up.
Quote
“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859
Mill was making the case that the quality of your thinking depends on how seriously you’ve engaged with people who disagree with you.
Question
Think about the last time someone at work pushed back on one of your ideas. Before that conversation ended, did you thank them for bringing it up?
Listen
Daniel Lubetzky spent ten years building PeaceWorks, a food company built on partnerships between Arab and Israeli suppliers, before it became clear the business wasn’t going to scale. By 2003, after his father’s death and a stretch of losses, he was running out of reasons to keep going. Instead of making the call alone, he brought the question of whether to try something new to his team. KIND came out of that conversation, and Mars eventually acquired KIND in a deal that reportedly valued the company at around $5 billion. The whole story of how he got from that room to that number is in this episode.
Read
Radical Candor by Kim Scott. A framework for being direct about what needs to change without making feedback personal.
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Scott