How Brands Stay Distinct in the Age of AI with Anthony Reeves, Author of Eat the Donkey | Ep. 450

One of the issues I see a lot, and it's happened to me in my career, I know it happens to a lot of people, is that like sometimes... you don't want to push back because you know it's going to be shut down, or it's going to be combative, or you'll get in trouble, or that person might be rude to you.

And you know the strategy is wrong, or the direction is wrong, but you just sit back and just do it because you don't want to have that combative conversation.

I wanted to ask you, I know we talked a little bit about like good for culture but there's not but like how do you create that environment instead of culture where like people can have like disagreements and still it's not like it's not a scary thing

if that makes sense i've been on both sides of that so as as uh sometimes as a creative person you you don't say anything Also, I know there's been times when someone's disagreed with the direction I want to go and they have not, probably because of my attitude or my mood at the time, I wanted to bring something up.

So that's something that as a leader, you've got to be aware of as well as how do you be approachable.

A good leader, any manager brings the weather with them.

So they're in a bad mood, the weather's cloudy.

If they're in a good mood, the weather's sunny.

The first thing is choosing your battles, is making sure that what you're gonna bring up is the right thing at the time and finding a way to bring it up is the best way.

And building that rapport before you have to bring something up is the number one way to do it, is making sure that you build that rapport early on.

And if you're a remote employee and you don't have to go to the office and your manager's in the office, I would recommend getting FaceTime with them, like not just, not over a screen, but face-to-face on a regular basis.

You're not You're not getting FaceTime for the sake of FaceTime.

You're getting FaceTime for that day when you want to push back or you want something or you need something as you're building that rapport from that very, very early stage.

If you just come out cold and ask for something or push back without knowing the person, that's the wrong way to approach it.

Going back to Ford, the CCO, Tom Cordner at the time, He got to the office very early and I knew that was the best time to push back on something that he wanted.

If he's in the office early, he's by himself, no one else is in there.

If I wanted to ask him a question about something, I always went in early in the morning to ask him that question.

If it was like five o'clock at night and he's just come out of a C-suite leadership meeting, I'm not going to ask him anything.

That's just not a good human way to do something.

I mean, it's so hard because I remember in my beginning of my career, like how much different it was to work in office because not because like just the working part of it is just that like spontaneous moments that happen in office where like you walk in the coffee and then you talk to someone from a team you probably never talked to or a bunch of people going to lunch that day or a bunch of people going to happy hour or whatever.

you could just bring someone into a meeting room, like spontaneous, like right now when you're remote, it's really hard because you don't have like impromptu things a lot.

Like it's the impromptu stuff is what really, a lot of ideas where I've seen come from was like, you're working in the conference, like walking to a coffee shop with that person, like let's have a walking meeting.

And it's like, oh, wait, we should do this.

Like, it's like, like me, it just, and you understand like how they're working style.

Like this person brings, like my one boss used to be vegan and he was a bike rider and used to come in from like, like things that you wouldn't know unless you're in the office.