Scripts for difficult conversations: Giving hard feedback, navigating defensiveness, the three questions you should end every meeting with, more | Alisa Cohn (executive coach)

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
I want to dive right in to talking about your advice on having difficult conversations, where like in performance review season, what you suggest when someone's being told they're not going to get the promotion.

**Alisa Cohn** (0:10)
Hope for the future is so important. I know this is going to be challenging for you to hear, not going to promote you, but I want you to know this. It's really important to me that you're able to succeed in your career here. And so I want to continue to help you find opportunities to build your skills and to advance.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:24)
You're big on helping leaders understand that their job is not to make employees happy.

**Alisa Cohn** (0:29)
They're trying to be the leader who everyone loves. But what really needs to happen very often is, you know, we need to drive towards results. This employee continuing to not really do a great job at their job, you don't want to push them because you don't want to upset them. You don't want to give them difficult feedback. So you're just going to keep hoping it works out. Ultimately, that leads to the demise of your company.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:50)
You have some cool advice on just how to make meetings more effective and how to especially end a meeting.

**Alisa Cohn** (0:54)
My three questions to end the meeting are.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:00)
Today, my guest is Alisa Cohn. Alisa is an executive coach who has worked with C-suite execs at both startups like Etsy, Wirecutter, Venmo, and DraftKings along with Fortune 500 companies like Microsoft, Google, Pfizer, and the New York Times. She was named one of the top 50 coaches in the world by Thinkers50 and the number one startup coach for the past four years by Global Gurus. What I love about Alisa is that she gives her clients very specific and actionable advice. In her conversation, Alisa shares specific language and phrases that you can use when having a difficult conversation with your reports to make these conversations go much smoother and be less difficult. Also three questions you should ask at the end of every meeting to make the most possible forward progress after each meeting, plus why your job as a leader isn't to make people happy and what you should be focused on instead, and a set of questions that she calls the founder prenup that you should talk through with potential founders to make sure that these are the people that you want to be working with for a long, long time. There's also so much more advice. If you're a leader of people or a founder, and especially if you dread hard conversations, this episode is for you. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Alisa Cohn. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next-generation A-B testing and feature management platform built by alums of Airbnb and Snowflake for modern growth teams. Companies like Twitch, Miro, ClickUp, and DraftKings rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Experimentation is increasingly essential for driving growth and for understanding the performance of new features. And Eppo helps you increase experimentation velocity while unlocking rigorous deep analysis in a way that no other commercial tool does. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform, where I could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more, with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into performance, and out-of-the-box reporting that helps you avoid annoying, prolonged analytic cycles. Eppo also makes it easy for you to share experiment insights with your team, sparking new ideas for the A-B testing flywheel. Eppo powers experimentation across every use case, including product, growth, machine learning, monetization, and email marketing. Check out Eppo at getepo.com/lenny and 10x your experiment velocity. That's geteppo.com/lenny.
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