We believe no matter what sport you're looking at, we believe that the coach makes a big difference. You have to have a good coach to have a winning team. So a good manager, the closest analogy is to a good coach of a sports team. That's actually interesting because sports teams have general managers and many managers consider them as the general manager instead of as the coach. So why did you choose the coach instead of the manager manager? It's a good question. Who is more famous for almost any sports team? We talk about the coach, not the general manager. Many, most people can name the coach of their favorite club, whether it's soccer or American football or ITACI or baseball. They can name the coach. Only the strongest fans can name the general manager, usually.
If I kind of break down the role of a manager, they actually have this dual rule. They have the responsibility of selecting people, like assemble the team to performance reviews. But the performance part, the leveling up people's performance, making them more productive, making the team a better team is the coaching part. You're correct that in business, we combine the roles that are split in sports. Often we combine them, not always, but normally the types of companies that normally split the roles are the consulting firms. Consulting firms usually have one set of people who do the hiring and the personnel management, more what you're calling the sports general manager role. And then they have the project manager who is more the coach to try to win in a particular engagement, to deliver an engagement.
Yeah, that's actually that puzzled me because a lot of effective coaches are not the great players. But naturally, intuitively, people would think the best players would be the best coach because they understand the game the most and they'd have the best skills. The why is this a discrepancy? The two roles aren't the same though. But it turns out having the most skill at kicking a ball or whatever doesn't make you good at the soft skills of creating a team, aligning a team. Of course, there's an overlap and it helps to be able to tell people kick the ball like this or here was my training regimen. But it isn't enough. Some ability, you have to understand the game, but then coupled with those other skills that either nature or development gave you in terms of how to build a team and how to influence and so on is what makes the package of a winning coach. And I think that's also true of a manager.
Yeah, like Messi, no matter how good he is at coaching, he cannot make everyone messy. It's about the teamwork. It's about assembling the team. It's not about up-leveling particular skills for each individual. Right. When we come back, why is there not more training for managers? You've realized in our discussion how complicated being a good manager is. I think companies take a look at that. They say, oh, that's really big. Probably if we invest in this person, before they get good at it, they'll go take a better job somewhere else. So when companies hire managers, what do companies seek? Like I know on resume, how many people you manage before your previous school is an important thing at all. But if you in an interview want to evaluate if this person is an effective manager, how would you do that? We can ask what they should do and also what they actually do.
So very common questions you would ask a manager would be about how they make decisions. So when they're under pressure or when there's a hard decision, the manager is often a decision maker. Amazon used this type of question that was phrased, tell me about a time because the idea was that what people have done is a better indicator of what they will do than what they say they might do. If you ask them, well, how would you handle this hypothetical situation? They make things up. Whereas if you ask them what they did do. A few different questions that were very common in our leadership in interviews was tell me about a time where you had to make a decision without all the data you wanted. And what we're trying to get at here is how do you handle time pressure and judgment? How have you handled it?
Another super common question is about personnel issues. Tell me about a time where you had someone who is struggling to perform. How did you handle that? What we're really trying to see in that case is a fairly basic thing, which is are you willing to engage with the interpersonal conflict of telling someone their work isn't what it needs to be? Because some managers avoid that. They are afraid of the conflict. And so we may also ask, tell us about a time where you disagree deeply with a peer. How did you resolve peer conflict? Another question for better for worse is tell me about a time where you had extreme date pressure and more work than you thought you could get done by a date.
Because this is common, right? Managers feel overloaded. And so how do they handle being overloaded or feeling overloaded? Those are a few of the things when you're asking what do companies look for. The thing is, I don't know as those capture, you'd like to ask them questions like, tell me how you've developed your skills as a manager or tell me what is your process for teaching yourself management. But those questions don't get asked because they don't feel very tangible. Other than the fact I like your answer, it's hard to evaluate what is a good answer. That's the problem with self-scales and everything is soft. It's very hard to evaluate. But I'm also curious what is a good answer to the last question, like how do you handle that day? There's always a lot of pressure and the more work. Ha ha ha.
A good answer that will get you a job anyway is one that combines communication, prioritization and creativity. If I were answering that question, I would be sure to mention that I always keep everyone informed. I'm facing date pressure, I can't do everything. Here's what I'm doing to do as much as possible. Here's what's above and below the line so that no one is surprised. So the first thing I'm showing is I'm a good manager because I don't surprise people. The second thing I'm going to say is the only answer to not being able to do everything is prioritization. Here's my way of prioritizing correctly, like of getting the priorities right.
And then my third answer, which is going to get me hired at most places is explaining somehow how because I'm able to show that I'm smart and creative, I magically get more done than expected. So I'm gonna tell some story relevant to the situation about how I overachieve. And that story varies, but what people want to hear, of course, when they ask this impossible question is they wanna hear that you're like a realistic person, but that somehow you still provide magic. As opposed to just saying, well, when I'm overloaded, I just only do part of the work and I try and do the most important work, they wanna hear that somehow you're very creative at expanding the envelope.
There are legitimate answers to that. We know, for example, a highly motivated team that's excited about their work will get more done than a team that is not excited or is disengaged. And so I would tell a story of maybe how in the past, I had gotten a team really excited so that the team voluntarily, without me really pressuring them, worked harder or worked smarter to get things done. I would talk about that coaching element, the mystical, I got my team of not superstars, play so well together that they beat the team of superstars that we're not playing well together. We all know the story of the team with no stars, but that somehow plays well together can sometimes beat the team that has a messy, but the rest of the team is not supporting a messy.
So let's go back to effective managers. And today's topic is, let's do the next question is, when you were as a manager, a director or VP, you work with many managers for long time. How would you characterize a good manager versus a not so effective manager? Their team is their engine. In the end, the manager isn't doing work. And in fact, if the manager is spending a lot of time, say trying to be a hands-on engineer, hands-on data scientist, they're often neglecting their team. I'm not against people being hands-on, but they have to have it in the right priority.
And so for me, are they hiring the right people? Are they being careful there? Are they growing their stars? The strongest performers on the team, are they recognizing them and giving them more and challenging them? At the same time, every team has a distribution of talent for your people who are struggling, not even necessarily struggling, who just aren't your strongest. Are you working with them? You try to improve them. I coached one person who had a very large team, and this is common, it's just this person is an example. This person had a team of, let's say, 1,000. And this person loved to work with their stars. And of course, if you pick the best 10 people out of 1,000 at a good company, they're going to be amazing. And so they really loved working with those people. And I asked them, I said, what are you doing for the bottom half of your team? Because the bottom half of your team is 500 people. Yes, maybe in that 500, there's a few that aren't ever going to do well, and the best thing to do is let them go. But you're not going to let go 500 people. And also on a team your size, those 500 people are costing your company at a tech company like $200 million a year. And so I was prompting this leader, what are you doing to make the bottom half better? Because they're a $200 million asset, and what you've told me in your leadership is you're basically ignoring them.
So when I think about a good leader, they have to lead their whole team. That's one element of management. Second element of management, I really think about is your peer relationships. How are you getting things done for your team? Because you need, usually, have dependencies on other people, and other people have dependencies on you, a manager really becomes a negotiator. They're busy negotiating schedules, and loaning resources, and commitments, and you build this, and I'll build that, and this is in scope, and this isn't out of scope. The two pieces there are communication and influence. The communication piece is being clear with your manager, maybe me, and with others. Where are we, and what are we blocked on, and what is red, and what is green?
Second piece is being influential. Can you get other people to change what they're doing? Can you work with another team, and get them to prioritize something you need, for example? The last part, I think, is a really good manager. The good leaders are also creative or inventive. They're seeing things that could be better, and they're inventing, they might be inventing new technology, they might be inventing a new business approach, they might be inventing a new way to organize, but somehow they are changing the playing field, to use our sports analogy again. In this case, they are seeing a way to play the game differently in order to have an advantage.
Yeah, I read a book called the E-Meth Revisited, and they have the technician, entrepreneur, and managers in their definition. The managers focus on process, focus on how to make the machine run. Technicians are focusing on solving the problem. Entrepreneurs focus on seeing the gap, seeing the future, and have the vision. They constantly want to event. I can see why that leader, who manage a thousand people, focus on the top 10 people. Because the top 10 people can help him or her do the last two jobs. He can get a lot of benefit by working with innovative top performers. You're absolutely right. The attraction is obvious.
The problem is you have 500 people, it's a huge number and a huge cost. You either need to use that asset. So the normal sort of best answer here, it's a recursive answer. He has a programming analogy. As a leader at that level, you have to train and develop people who report to you. But also, part of training and developing them is making sure they are training and developing their managers. And then those managers are training and developing. So you have to recurse down, make sure as best you can. Of course, fidelity gets lost as you get further away. Like this recursion isn't like a computer that's perfect. There's a fidelity loss at each level. But you're trying to set up a recursive structure so that the manager at the bottom still has all these goals and is working on improving their team and being innovative and driving results just like you are.
This is very hard to do. When you go up, your way of influencing goes from conduction to conviction to radiation. It's kind of a physical metaphor. Like that. And it is true. Although there are some ways around that. Mass communication channels, I used to send my team a weekly email to my whole team, even when I had many hundreds of people. I sent some email to them every Sunday night bearing my perspective as a leader. Some people have told me those even 10 years later, they remember those emails. Mass communication allows you to get around one on one and flatten the structure. Of course, if you look at Jensen Wong at NVIDIA, he talks a lot about the virtue of a flat structure. And he's an extremist in terms of a flat reporting structure. But even in a hierarchical reporting structure, you can have flattened communication because someone at the front line can email me and I can email my largest team was 800 people. I can email all 800 at once. Or I can, if I have something that only applies to 300 of them, I can email all 300 at once.
So there is some ability to get around the radiation. I want to hear a story or an example of how you can convince someone that you can influence someone to realize their ideas are stupid without telling them. In terms of a story, Amazon bought Twit. And I went to Twit to work for their CEO, Emmett Sheer. And my initial job, we call being his spirit guide. But what it meant was my job was to tell him how Amazon worked so that he could understand Amazon. And I had zero authority, no one in Twit reported to me and I reported Emmett. So I had no authority to tell him anything, but I would see things that I knew weren't going to work within Amazon.
And I developed this phrase, which was, could I share how I've seen this done elsewhere? And why I would ask that is first, if I was say talking to his leadership team and I said, can I share how I've seen this done elsewhere? Number one, I could say, could I share how we do this at Amazon? But that would already raise their threat warning of like, oh, he's about to tell us what we have to do for Amazon. So I didn't want to use the Amazon word. The second thing though, was no one except a complete jerk will ever look at you and say, no, you can't share anything, like just get out. So they kind of had to say yes, but then once they said yes, they kind of had to at least listen. Didn't mean they had to do what I wanted. But it gave me a chance to say, well, I don't know enough about Twitch yet, but here's what our concerns are. Here's the constraints and why. Here's how it works. Remember, this person you're trying to influence is a smart person which had success as a high performer and they want to keep having that.
So they want to be right, they want their idea to be good. And if you can expose them to information without threatening them, without raising their defenses, their natural desire to want to succeed will make them take that information if it truly helps them. And so the way you influence people is you avoid threatening them and you gain over time in particular, you have to play the long game, you're trying to gain two thoughts in their mind. One, Ethan is always out for my good, he's always trying to help me. Two, Ethan often says smart things. You don't have to be perfect nor, but they have to believe when Ethan talks, he's trying to help me and when Ethan talks, he's usually pretty smart.
And at that point, if you start saying things, they're like, oh, that's a good point. I didn't think about whatever taxes or the cost of the technology stack or the security implication. Then they'll be like, oh, I haven't thought about that. How would you solve it? Or, and they're very open at that point because you've moved them. What you wanna do is switch the conversation from oppositional to collaborative. And I want to help the audience summarize what I just heard because the Twitch story is so great and you started with the collaboration. Like, yeah, like when you frame it as a conflict, you try to convince, you kind of shut down the door of collaboration. And collaboration is kind of the key of making effective influence.
You need to accept that you can be wrong and the other person can be right in order to, that's the start of collaboration. And in a particular situation, you are in a very difficult situation because no capital, no authority, you are supposed to represent, you are reporting to the CEO. So you started with respecting his agency and the agency of other senior leaders and cause it recognize the respect. And so they welcome your information. And by playing the long game of providing useful information, you slowly establish kind of your seat at the table. That is correct. That is very much correct.