A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love | Rachel Lockett

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
When clients come to you, what is the biggest gap they have that is keeping them from being successful as leaders?

**Rachel Lockett** (0:05)
Most leaders, especially technical leaders, assume they have to have all the answers. People have climbed the ladder because they've been dependable, reliable, the smartest person in the room. But great leaders know that when you try to advise and have the answer all the time, you're not actually equipping your team to go solve the hard problems. You're training your team to come to you with all of the hard problems.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:27)
Difficult conversations are difficult. How do we help people make them less difficult?

**Rachel Lockett** (0:31)
We operate in tech. We're supposed to give all of ourselves, all of our time, all of our energy to this endeavor. And it's purely logical. That's not at all true. It's completely emotional. Professionals have feelings. People when they want to have a conflict, they come in ready to prove their point. There's a misguided view that the goal is to convince the other person that what they're doing is wrong. Actually, the goal of any conflict is to create mutual understanding.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:57)
Talk about what you've learned about helping leaders in tech avoid burnout.

**Rachel Lockett** (1:01)
When people are in their gifts and their strengths, they have more energy. We all have more energy when we're operating from the things we naturally are good at. It's no one else's job to help you live in your gifts. What I notice in big companies is people are often annoyed or frustrated with their management for not making their job more interesting. No, your manager's job is to help you perform in the job you were hired to do. It's your job to navigate your career.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:26)
The power of this is this makes your life so much better.

**Rachel Lockett** (1:28)
Lenny, let's try it. So I want you to tell me a challenge, something that you're struggling with.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:33)
The main thing I struggle with these days is just... Today, my guest is Rachel Lockett, an executive coach and former long-time HR leader at Pinterest and at Stripe. She works with COs and founders and leaders at tech companies on both ways that they are, emotional and positive intelligence, resilience and courage, and what they do, setting vision and strategy, prioritizing and building trusted and accountable teams. She's someone I've heard a lot about over the years from other podcast guests, and this conversation is powerful. It's jam-packed with advice and tips and frameworks that'll make you a better leader and also a better person. We even do a couple live coaching sessions to demonstrate some of Rachel's approaches, and as you'll see, I had a number of epiphanies during this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of a ton of incredible products, including Devon Lovable, Replit, Bolt, Ennit, and Linear Superhuman, Descript, Busper, Fluid Gamma, Reflexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, Jepier, De-Mobin, and Stripe Atlas. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Rachel Lockett after a short word from our sponsors.
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