Lessons - The Standard You Don't Enforce (Scott)

In this lessons episode I'm talking about confrontation, not fights or blowups, just the small everyday moments where something bothers you and you say nothing. For example, for six months I watched someone on my team miss a standard that I'd set and I'd never say a word. I'll walk you through what that cost me, what I learned from studying how Nick Sabin and Pixar handled the same problem, and why staying quiet is never as neutral as it feels. Today I want to talk about confrontation, not this dramatic version of it, not blowing up or telling someone off, just this everyday version of confrontation, right? Someone on your team misses a deadline or there's a conversation that you need to have with your partner or your spouse that keeps getting pushed or a friend does something that bothers you when you say nothing or just something isn't sitting right and you know it, but addressing it feels like it's more trouble than it's worth so you just let it go and then you tell yourself you're being patient or reasonable or mature or whatever and maybe sometimes that's true, but most of the time if I'm being honest with myself it's just that I don't want to have uncomfortable conversation and I just don't want confrontation in my life, that's it. And I want to talk about how the cost of avoiding confrontation it's a lot higher than it feels like in the moment and I know this because I lived it pretty recently with somebody on my own team. So for about six months, my main editor who I love to death, he's amazing. He was posting episodes late, not every time, but often enough that it had become a real pattern. So it could be a good day late, sometimes two days late, and every time it happened I noticed and I checked the feed and I'd see the episode hadn't gone up and when I was supposed to and I felt this little flicker of frustration, but then I just move on without saying anything. And this story I was telling myself was that it wasn't a big enough deal, that the episodes were still going up, the quality was fine, the show was fine. And making an issue out of a day or two felt like I was being the kind of boss and nobody wanted to work for, right? I was just nitpicking over something small when everything else was running so well. So I just kept letting it go, week after week, month after month. But here's what was actually true. I actually genuinely cared. I wanted to stick to a schedule and a routine. I just didn't want to be the person who said so. And there is a real difference between something genuinely not mattering to you and something mattering to you, but you're not wanting to deal with it. And I knew which one it was for me. See, I had set a standard for my podcast, my show that I wasn't holding and every week that I didn't say anything to my editor, I was making a choice. And it wasn't a passive choice. It was an active choice to choose my own comfort over choosing something that I said I cared about. And when I finally had the conversation, it took maybe 10 minutes. It was calm. It was direct. It was really nothing. It was a type of conversation that should have happened in week two, but those six months had done something. They had turned this simple, easy conversation into this one that now it's six months of silence sitting behind it. It wasn't just about late episodes anymore. It was also about why I waited so long to say anything. I had made a small problem into a more complicated problem by just basically doing nothing. Now, the reason most of us do this, and I include myself here for sure, is that the word confrontation immediately makes you picture something adversarial. Like if you confront someone, you're starting a fight or you're making them feel bad or you're being the difficult person in the room. And because we don't want to be that person, we go all the way to the other extreme and just say nothing. But I think that's the wrong response. I think that's the wrong way to look at it. And honestly, when I was researching a little bit for this podcast, I found two great stories. The first is Nick Sabbath. Nick is the best example I can think of in somebody who understands how to use conflict productively. If you don't follow college football, he coached Alabama for 17 years. He won seven national championships. He had a record of two or one and 29. And those numbers alone are insane. But the numbers aren't really the point. The point is how we built this team and this club and this franchise. Because when you actually study his program, all the tactical stuff, all the recruiting, it's almost secondary to something much simpler. The man was relentless about standards. And he never, ever let them slide. And he had a phrase for it. He said, you have to challenge people to do things a certain way, reinforce it when they do and confront them when they don't. And the thing is he didn't treat confrontation like this unpleasant thing you occasionally have to deal with. It wasn't separate from the coaching. It was the coaching. Take that piece out and the whole thing falls apart. But here's the part about his story that really stayed with me. There was a stretch where Alabama went on a 19 game winning streak, 19 games in a row. And you would think that would be the peak, right? Everything's clicking. The culture is at its strongest. But Saban said the opposite happened. Somewhere in the middle of that streak, things started to quietly drift. So players stopped asking what time practice started and started asking why they had to practice at all on Mondays. Nobody made some big decision to stop caring. It just happened gradually because they were winning. And winning made it feel like pushing on things was unnecessary. Like the standard was taking care of itself. But what Saban understood was that it wasn't. Standards never take care of themselves. They hold because someone is actively holding them. The moment you stop, they start to erode. And it's not fast, it's not dramatic, it's just a little bit, little by little at a time. And by the time you notice the drift, you've already lost so much ground and it's hard to get back. And this happens in work, in relationships, in life. He also said something that I keep coming back to. He said, some of the greatest leaders in history were not adored, but respected. So stop trying to please everyone and do what you believe is best. And I think what that really means in practice is that caring about someone and being honest with them aren't two different things. They're the same thing. And when you actually respect someone, you don't just absorb everything and smile. You tell them the truth and that's what respect actually looks like. This is where productive confrontation comes in. And Saban isn't the only example of this. There's a story from Pixar that I think about a lot that I think ties into this nicely. So in the late 90s, Pixar was working on Toy Story 2. And they had already changed the entire industry with the first Toy Story. And on the surface, Toy Story 2 seemed like it was moving along fine, like the team was working, everything's progressing, deadlines are being hit. But underneath all of that, the film had a real problem. The story just wasn't landing. The emotional core, the thing that makes a Pixar movie feel like a Pixar movie wasn't there. And the people who could feel that, the senior creative people who had been through enough projects to know that something was off, they weren't saying it directly enough. Because at that point, so much time and money and effort had gone into the project that saying, this isn't working, almost felt disloyal. Like, you were discounting everything the team had already sacrificed. Ed Katmo, who had co-founded and ran Pixar, wrote about this later in his book Creativity Inc. He described how they had built something called the Brain Trust, which was a group of their most experienced creative people who would watch rough cuts and then just tell you exactly what they thought. No softening, no politics, just honest feedback. And the whole point of that room was the goal wasn't to be polite. The goal was to get the film right. And Katmo knew from experience that you couldn't get there without people being willing to say the hard thing out loud. So when they finally ran Toy Story 2 through that process, it was brutal. The film wasn't good enough and they were nine months from the release date when they got that news. Nine months when they went through this Brain Trust process. Now, most studios in that position would have shipped it. Told themselves they'd do better next time moved on. Pixar went back in and rebuilt the emotional core of the entire film and the time they had left. And Toy Story 2 came out and made over $500 million and still holds a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, here's the thing about that story that gets me every time I think about it. Katmo didn't just encourage people to speak up. He had to build an entire formal system. The Brain Trust, specifically because he knew that without it, the default would always be silence. And it's not because people were dishonest. It's not because they didn't care. It's just because staying quiet is easier. It's comfortable. You tell yourself it'll probably sort itself out. And Pixar, a company full of some of the smartest creative people on the planet, literally had to build a room and a process specifically to fight that instinct. Because Katmo knew that if he didn't force honesty into the workflow, comfort would win every time. Now, most of us aren't running a movie studio and we don't have a Brain Trust, but it's the same thing whether you're managing a team of two or running a company. At some point, you just have to decide you're going to be the person who says the thing. Not because it's easy, but because you've decided that the standard actually matters. This is where productive competition comes in. And here's the thing that I had to unlearn. I used to think that staying quiet, that not having the conversation, that not having any confrontation was a neutral move, that not saying something when a standard slip was just keeping the peace and not adding to the drama. But silence is never actually neutral. When you stay quiet, you're always sending a message whether you mean to or not. So either you didn't notice, which tells people that you're not paying attention, or you noticed and you didn't say anything, which tells them the standard wasn't worth defending. And both of these things over time teach people around you that your lines and your standards are really just suggestions. That the easiest way to operate around you is to just test things and see what actually happened. And the longer you stay quiet, the worse it gets. Avoidance doesn't make the problem go away. It just keeps it alive and it adds resentment on top of it. And every week that you don't address something, the gap between what you're tolerating and what you actually want gets a little bit wider. And if you let that go long enough, that gap doesn't feel temporary anymore, it just becomes how things are. I've seen this everywhere. I've seen business partnerships where someone accepts terms they resent because negotiating feels awkward and they carry that resentment for months until it poisons the whole relationship. I've seen personal relationships where someone absorbs something that bothers them and they just keep absorbing it and they keep telling themselves they're being patient. And then one day it comes out in a way that is totally added proportion to whatever triggered it. And the other person is completely blindsided like where is this coming from? It was coming from six months of things that never got said. It didn't come from nowhere. I mean, I've had my own version of this Alabama thing too. Like stretches in my business where things are going well enough that I stopped holding the line on stuff that mattered to me. Things were working. Revenue was up. Podcast was growing. So I let little things slide. And every time without fail, something eventually broke in a way that was way bigger and messier than one honest 10-minute conversation would have been. So I'm still working on all this, honestly. And every time I need to address something, there's still a part of me that starts looking for a reason to wait. Maybe one more week, maybe it resolves on its own. Maybe I'm overthinking it. That instinct is still there. What's different now is that I recognize it pretty quickly for what it actually is, which is just not wanting to be uncomfortable. That's it. That's the whole thing. And what helped me most is just thinking about confrontation different. So when I tell someone directly that something isn't working, I'm not being harsh. I'm saying this matters enough to me to be straight with you about it. I'd rather have 10 awkward minutes than spend the next few months quietly working around a problem that I never addressed. And the people who never push back on you, who always tell you everything is fine and absorb every frustration without saying a word, they're not actually being kind. They're just avoiding the same discomfort you are, even in my personal relationship. Gina and I talk about this. One of the things that we've landed on is that we'd rather have small uncomfortable conversations early than a big one later. Say it when it's a pebble, not when it's a boulder. And the result of that is that most of our hard conversations are actually pretty short. Like a few minutes, clear the air done. The things that could have turned into weeks of tension, get handled before they ever get that far. Because the blowups, the fights that feel like they came out of nowhere, they almost never actually come out of nowhere. They come from a long trail of smaller moments where someone could have said something and didn't. Remember, the standard you don't enforce becomes a standard you accept. And the conversation you keep putting off doesn't get easier with time. It just gets heavier. And most of those conversations, if you actually just go and have them are shorter and less painful than the version that you've been building up in your head.