Worklife with Molly Graham - What pressure can teach you about leadership with Don Faul

0:00Your job as a leader is to support and serve your people. It's almost the, you know, when I was a more naïve leader, I thought it was the opposite. You know, that my people were there to kind of serve and support me. But, you know, the leadership, you know, in the Marine Corps, and this is still a philosophy that I try to aspire to, I think is about serving and supporting your people. And if you can do so, they can achieve great things. I learned to lead on a mountainside. Not metaphorically, I mean literally.

0:33My first job out of college was leading wilderness expeditions for a school called Knowles. I led 75-day mountaineering and sea kayaking trips for folks in Patagonia and Alaska. And yes, I am proud of the fact that I have gone 52 days without showering. Yes, it's gross, I know, but it's also one of my fun facts. Learning to lead in the wilderness is not a slow process.

0:57When you're dealing with things like lightning or 30 days straight of pouring rain or avalanche danger, you get feedback pretty quickly about your leadership. Consequences feel bigger and more immediate. People can get hurt. But that makes it more clear why leadership is so important and what's working and not working about whatever it is that you're doing. I've thought about that experience a lot over the years.

1:26because I think there's something about leading in high stakes environments that teaches you things in weeks that it can take years to learn in business. It strips away all the performance of leadership and forces you down to the things that actually matter. And if that's true on a wilderness expedition, imagine what you learn when people's lives are actually regularly on the line. What does leading under pressure teach you?

1:56and what can the rest of us take from it? My guest today is Don Fall. Don started his leadership journey at the Naval Academy and then spent five years as a Marine Corps officer inside a unit called Force Reconnaissance, one of the most elite units in the Marines. After the Marines, he went on to become one of the earliest operational leaders at Google and then one of the most important operational leaders at Facebook.

2:22where he built and ran global teams during the company's most intense years of growth. After Facebook, he went out on his own, most recently serving as the CEO of CrossFit. A lot of leaders start in the military. Few of them spend the next 20 years stress testing those lessons the way Don has. I became friends with Don during our early years at Facebook. He was well known there as the manager that everyone wanted to work for.

2:51When we both left, we created a group of execs that met monthly to keep each other sane and to learn from each other. Which means I've seen Don through some incredible highs and lows. And where I often feel like a chaotic mess, Don has always seemed like the steadiest person in the room. So today, I want to know what pressure actually teaches you about leadership. And Don has better answers to that question than almost anyone I've ever met. I'm Molly Graham, and this is Work Life, where we untangle the messy human side of work. I feel like when people picture great leadership or great leaders, they imagine someone like really confident and decisive and certain.

3:41I'm curious in your experience, what does great leadership actually look like? It's funny. Like what you described there is when I was a young leader, what I thought I had to be. And you know, when I was young, you know, you don't have a lot or I didn't have a lot of certainty around anything. And you're often faced with this choice of like, do you fake it? The old fake it, do you make it? Like you have to project confidence even if you don't feel it. And over time I learned that actually it's quite, it's something quite different. And I think it probably took me personally, gosh, 15 years. I'd say I spent six years in the Marine Corps, went back to grad school, transitioned in technology. I think it was really, if I did to really pin it down as during my time at Facebook, where I finally got to the point where I had finally learned and internalized this notion of I think great leadership is often about understanding the uncertainty. It's about humility and recognizing that.

4:38You don't and can't as a leader always have the answer and great leaders understand how to inspire and project confidence while creating the conditions where you can bring people together when you don't have the answer and and lead them to it. So okay, so let's go back to the beginning. You started your work journey and I think your leadership journey at the Naval Academy and then in the Marines. Can you explain for those of us that were not in any branch of the military your path there and also what force reconnaissance was? Sure. Yeah, so I I graduated high school and ended up enrolling in the United States Naval Academy, which for folks who are not familiar with that, think of it as a combination of a normal university experience plus military on top of it. So I studied systems engineering and on top of that, you do a bunch of curriculum and experiences and around leadership, military knowledge tactics.

5:38I graduated from there and upon graduation you go and do five years kind of minimum five years of service and for the Naval Academy that's either in the Navy or the Marine Corps which is a part of the Department of the Navy. I chose the Marine Corps largely for cultural reasons.

5:57and then had the opportunity to serve as a Marine infantry officer. So there are a ton of different jobs in the Marine Corps from the infantry to aviation to supply. You get matched with that job type. I started in the infantry, and then my second job in the infantry, I transitioned to a unit called First Force Reconnaissance Company, which that unit's mission was a combination of gathering information, so reconnaissance, putting small teams out.

6:26to gather information on the battlefields, and then a mix of what they call direct action, which can be everything from hostage rescue to very specific targeted missions. So I had the opportunity and privilege to serve with that group as well. So you were in active service, meaning you were overseas on the ground. Will you just tell us a little bit? Give us, give me some context. I've never even asked you half these questions.

6:52Good. I graduated from the Naval Academy in 1998. I went into your training in Quantico, and then I was stationed out at Camp Pendleton in San Diego, so very lucky to have a great duty station. I deployed with the Marine Corps in August of 2001. So the Marine Corps at any given time, the Marine Corps is an expeditionary force.

7:17in terms of the US military. And what that means is that the Marine Corps can deploy, does deploy forces in partnership with the Navy in forward operating theaters. So generally the Marine Corps will have Marines out aboard Navy ships in the Western Pacific and Marines out on Navy ships in the Atlantic region. And that way, if there are things that happen, you have troops that you can deploy rapidly into any environment. And so I was going on one of those six month deployment you get on ship. Again, this is August of 2001, so it was a see the world, go to Australia, go to some great ports, do some training, come home. And I was in Darwin, Australia on 9-11. And on 9-11, we knew that our deployment had changed in a pretty profound sort of way. So I ended up from there, we went immediately from Darwin. We spent a couple of days in East Timor doing some humanitarian work, and then we deployed to the Arabian Gulf.

8:13for the initial invasion of Afghanistan in November, December of 2001. I came back from Afghanistan in 2002. I transitioned to my second unit, so that forced reconnaissance unit. I did about another year of training and then I deployed to Iraq in Kuwait and Iraq in early 2003 for the invasion, the initial invasion of Iraq. I spent about six months there and then I came home in the summer of 2003.

8:43Okay, so 9-11 happens. What a crazy moment to experience leaders trying to grapple with the fact that everything just changed. Were you a leader at that time or were you... Can you tell us a little bit about how that day happened and what happened? Sure. In 2001, I was a 23, 24-year-old, probably a first lieutenant, so that's the second rank.

9:10I was responsible for a platoon of Marines or roughly 30 Marines. We had mechanized infantry, so armored vehicles for armored vehicles. And my job was kind of leadership of that group. And most of what you do in the military when you're not at war is training and preparation. And so most of your job is making sure that you're ready for what you may be confronted with.

9:35We did a week-long joint training exercise with the Australian Army in Darwin, Australia, which is up in the Northern Territory. Like the bush, you got saltwater crocodiles, and a whole bunch of other crazy stuff. And we had just done a week of training. We had our first day off, and I think about 45 days since we had left San Diego.

10:00We were in an Irish pub in Darwin, Australia and we watched 9-11 on TV at, I don't know, 10 at night in this haze of having had probably too many cocktails and we realized in that moment, obviously, that the world had changed in a really profound way and that we knew for us the implications. We knew we were deployed for that reason and that there is a very good chance that we would find ourselves in that region pretty quickly.

10:29Yeah. And so, so then what happened? Sorry to go deep on this, but I'm actually just very curious because it must have been a crazy experience as such a young leader to realize that you were going from what probably was a lot of preparation to suddenly like, Oh, we're probably going to be an active, active duty. Um, and that means a lot to you, but it also means a lot to everyone that's working with you. Yeah. We, you know, it was, you know, I can remember vividly, you know, so we, um, you know, that happens. We, probably not the greatest timing. We had to scramble to get 3,000 Marines who were spread all across Darwin back on ship. We left I think at like seven or eight the next morning. So we found most of the Marines and then we had a few that we had to track down and catch up with us. And you know at that point we didn't have a lot of information. You know there was I remember somebody had said hey gosh the irony of this now the timing on it you know someone saying hey I heard we've declared war on Iran which turned out obviously not to be true at that point but

11:29We were spinning a bit and trying to make sense of what was actually happening and what that meant for us. We ended up in the Arabian Gulf. General Mattis, actually Secretary Mattis, our former Secretary of Defense, he was a one-star general at the time. He flew out to meet us and became the task force commander for that initial invasion. As you can imagine at the time, there was a mix of all sorts of different emotions.

11:57A lot of uncertainty, a lot of questions to be answered, a lot of things to figure out. I'd say we were, I think the busyness of it and the amount of work that had to be done was helpful. It didn't leave a lot of time for thinking and fear and all of that. There's certainly of course some of that, but it was really then about, okay, now we know emissions coming. How do we make sure we're ready?

12:26Okay. So looking back now on that experience, that moment in time, what do you feel like you learned about leadership from it? You know, I remember, and this is fast forwarding a little bit to being, so we ended up going into Afghanistan. So we went ashore in Pakistan. We flew from Southern Pakistan, the coast into this tiny airfield in the middle of Afghanistan. I think about a hundred miles south of Kandahar and We started doing, that was the initiation of combat operations for us. And we eventually moved into Kandahar Airport, international airport. And we seized that in Kandahar and we established that as a base for humanitarian operations, some of the security operations. And then we started bringing in, the US then could start to fly in resources. And I remember being there and it really struck me at that point how important my role was.

13:23in terms of setting an emotional tone for the group that, you know, we had some things happen that were, you know, we had some people get injured and, you know, I could feel myself getting impacted in a significant sort of way by the emotion, by the fear, by the sadness. And I remember having just this stark moment of looking around and realizing every single one of my experiences looking at me right now.

13:50And it's not only what I say, but it's how I show up. It's what I project and they will feed off that. And you know, I think that that is that that's obviously a circumstance and very profound situation, but that same thing is true. I found that to be true in my career of going through various situations and people look to leadership for not only specific direction, but You know they read off how you're feeling and what you're projecting and that you know Infuses itself throughout the organization. So I learned that in a really significant sort of way You know and then last thing I'll say and I could obviously go on forever about this But I that was the you know first time I had the opportunity to serve I served under General Mattis there and you know 74 levels below him probably more than that but We had the opportunity to be around him and he

14:41what I've never been around a more extraordinary leader on every dimension, but the things that really jumped out, you know, this was a, we talk about serving leadership in the Marine Corps all the time, this notion of your job as a leader is to support and serve your people. It's almost the, you know, when I was a more naive leader, I thought it was the opposite, you know, that my people were there to kind of serve and support me, but you know, the leadership, you know, in the Marine Corps, and this is still philosophy that I try to aspire to, I think is about serving and supporting your people, and if you can do so, they can achieve great things. And I've never seen someone embody that more than General Mattis, who, you know, the contrast is a one-star general, you know, being so senior, but being able to engage with Marines and show them and project this notion of I work for you, I serve for you, you know, small story, General Mattis would walk the lines.

15:37I would walk the lines to check on my Marines at night to make sure they were awake and paying attention, et cetera. And I would find General Mattis, a one star general, sitting in a fighting hole with a 19 year old Lance Corporal talking to him about his life and asking him questions about how he's doing and to see have what he needs. And the impact that had on those Marines was really profound and I'll never forget that.

16:11I feel like when most people think about leadership in the military, they think very directive style of leadership, right? Where it's like, I give orders and you take them and you don't ask questions and, you know, that's, but that isn't what servant leadership is. So will you actually just talk about like what is different in the Marines and really what it looks like day to day? Sure. Sure. Yeah. So, so, you know, I think this is one of the most common misperceptions when I talk to folks who have not served, and I understand why. There are a lot of folks, I remember very early on meeting with a senior leader at Google, and they're like, hey, this isn't the Marine Corps, we don't just tell people what to do. I'm like, well, that's actually not how the Marine Corps works either. I think the Marine Corps in general philosophically really believes in this notion of servant leadership.

17:01You've probably read the book, Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek. That phrase comes from the Marine Corps. I learned that as a 21-year-old second lieutenant, Leaders Eat Last. That's one of those rituals that reinforces, right? It's this very powerful, subtle thing that it's not about you, your job is to support your Marines. And now, there are times, and there are times when a decision has to get made.

17:28and you don't have the time to workshop it and get everyone's inputs. And there is an environment that supports, my Marines knew if I said, hey, we need to make a call, you had the trust and support to execute and line up behind it. But I think great leaders in the Marine Corps, great leaders in the military, outside of the military, they understand that the best outcomes come from an environment where you can get that input and that perspective. And often in the military, and the military needs to enable decentralized decision-making. In many cases, to use force reconnaissance, for example, we would send out teams of five or six Marines, hundreds of miles into enemy territory with infrequent communication or potentially at times unreliable communication, and they didn't make decisions. And so you needed to have a construct where they understood what success was like and felt empowered to make decisions to go execute on that mission. And all of your training

18:27And all of the culture is about enabling that. What do you feel like you were taught in the Marines that most managers never get taught? You have an exceptionally high bar and you don't make excuses and you take ownership for things. So, you know, when you show up the Naval Academy as a freshman, they call you plebs to reinforce that you have no rights. You are there to learn. We're going to rebuild you. And you learn basically you have four, they call them the four basic responses.

18:56When someone addresses you there's only four things you can say you know yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. No, sir. I'll find out sir or no excuse sir. That's it and That was super powerful because I you realize very quickly when you're taught those things that you've I've lived my life making excuses for things that didn't go right and You just learn in the military you you just say you find a way or make one and When I was coming out of the Marine Corps, I came out for almost six years of active during the Marine Corps after the Naval Academy. I went back to grad school. I started my first job at Google, and I knew not zero about technology. Nothing. I had this military experience, but to me it felt very foreign.

19:44I remember looking at when I was applying for jobs, looking at all of these roles and feeling like I was not qualified for any of them, right? We were looking for some of the five, seven years of consumer technology experience. I didn't have that. But I remember starting in a few months in just being grateful for, I don't, you know, starting any particular project, starting a particular work. I don't know how to do it, but I'm not giving up. And I will find a way to get it done. And you come to realize that, you can actually get up to speed pretty quickly. And that, you know, I've found over time, you know, when you're looking at hiring great people, that quality is so much more important than the domain expertise. The domain expertise can be learned, but that innate commitment to excellence, to getting things done is super, super powerful. So I'm really grateful to my military experience for teaching me that.

20:37Yeah, I also love the theme of taking responsibility for what you can control, which I do think is interesting. I think of it as something that's innate, either you're raised with it or you're not, but you're talking about it being taught, which is cool. I like that. No excuse, sir. Trying to teach that to my kids, but it's not going well. Let me tell you.

21:01Will you just talk a little bit about like the transition from the military to civilian leadership or business leadership or however you want to talk about it and like tell the story of sort of how it happened, but also the culture shock or just like what translated and what didn't? Sure. Yeah. So I decided to get out of the Marines after I got back from Iraq.

21:27And I'd love my time in the military. Again, it was a really hard decision for me, but, you know, I was kind of ready for that next phase of my career, even though I had no idea what it was, like zero. I'd been, you know, between the Naval Academy and the Marine Corps in the military for my entire adult life, 10 years. I'd studied engineering undergrad, but, you know, I couldn't write a lot of code. I didn't, you know, there was nothing practical there. So I had this moment of, you know, I remember being really excited about transitioning out of the military and the freedom and what was next. And then this,

21:57overwhelming, oh my God, what am I gonna do with the rest of my life? I ended up going back to grad school, largely to kick the can on finding a job for two years. And then, you know, kind of stumbled my way into tech. I was just incredibly fortunate while I was in school to get connected to another vet who was at Google, who was nice enough to, you know, hand walk my resume and translate it to the recruiter there. I ended up getting an internship and you know it's funny when I you know so I show up for my first day at the internship and I was lucky to get my host was this incredible manager but he was like the opposite of me he was like he was an operations leader but he you know would write code on the weekends and build just a brilliant guy who knew technology inside and out he's also a great manager and leader but I was so intimidated and he's like done your project for the summer at Google is you're going to be working on the AdSense API and I'm like

22:52Awesome. That sounds really interesting. And then I had to go look up what APIs were because I had absolutely no idea. And I remember like the day before my first day work there, I was terrified. I'm like, I am going to make a fool of myself. I know nothing about technology. I don't know how I got this internship. And then this just incredible summer. And, you know, I think what I learned at that point was.

23:16I had just grossly underestimated how much of my experience in the military would be relevant and valuable in this completely different corporate culture. Like, can you imagine, you know, the two ends of the extremes, the United States Marine Corps infantry to Google circa 2005. But I found, you know, at the end of the day, like those things that I learned, people are people, you know, and from a leadership perspective, while I knew that the cultural context was different and the language was different. And I'd say there was more of an expectation from people to be a part of the conversation and have the context around decisions. At the end of the day, what it takes to build a high performing team, 90% of it's the same. And so I found, oh my gosh, all these things I had learned about bringing people together, about connecting with them, about showing them that I care about them, about

24:12you know, being able to communicate and inspiring path forward, those are all relevant. The way you do them is different, but foundationally, they're the same. And so, you know, it took me, certainly it took me a while to learn a lot about the industry, to learn a lot about, you know, the job itself. But I was really pleasantly surprised to find that so many of the things that I had learned as a young leader, and there are a few places at age 21 out of college where you get to manage 30 people under challenging circumstances. So I was super fortunate to have, you know, had the opportunity to do that.

24:42Hmm. You know, you talked about some of the things you admired about General Mattis, like spending time on the front lines and you talked about moral courage. Will you tell a story about just like a moment when you were like, Oh, this translates? Oh yeah. Um, so fast forward a bunch of years. Um, actually when we were working at Facebook together, um, I was, my teams had responsibility for content policy and a whole bunch of content moderation.

25:11And I think folks who pay attention to this know there are a few problems more challenging than figuring out how to moderate content on the internet and on these platforms. And this is early, so we were figuring it all out from the beginning. And starting to learn how challenging it was to build a set of policies in an infrastructure that scales, that creates, that is replicable, that creates a safe environment for people.

25:36And it was also an enormously high pressure area because we would have literally heads of state or countries putting pressure on Facebook to make decisions. And I was in the middle of that. Our team was in the middle of that. Our team was responsible for both setting the policies and executing against them. And we had a number of scenarios where there was real conflict around what the right decision was around the policies.

25:59And so, you know, this is a relevant topic today, right? This is happening front page today, but, you know, imagine someone posts a deeply offensive joke about women. And it's clearly satire. It's clearly a joke. But it's deeply offensive to people. What do you do about that? And so, you know, we have done our best to figure out, okay, you know, how do we build a philosophical foundation for our policies, our general approach was that, hey, we generally wanted to be based on principles around free speech and what you could say in any street corner in the US should govern the start of the foundation. We're going to respect local laws, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have these individual edge cases that are extraordinarily challenging. And whatever you can think of in the world has been posted on these platforms. And by the way, the policies you create have to be able to be executed at an unprecedented scale.

26:58by people all over the world. So very, very extraordinarily challenging problem that these platforms are still wrestling with today. It's very hard. And it put us square in the bullseye of lots of conflict. And there were scenarios where what I felt like was the right approach was a bad business outcome for Facebook. And I'm not saying I won't claim that I was always right, but I had conviction around what I thought was the right point of view from you know where I was sitting which was the you know operation side the policy side and It was incredibly stressful. You know, literally we had heads of state writing in whose families had been targeted with content It kind of implying if it's not addressed in a satisfactory way that they were going to take action against the company and you know I had to advocate for what I thought was the right approach for both the platform and for my team and

27:56didn't always go well for me. And I didn't always make the right call, but there were a lot of cases where I remember thinking like, I can make the easy decision here that I know will get us through this in the short. It'll make this press story go away, but it then will create a whole bunch of problems for us down the line. And part of what I hear in that for you on the sort of moral courage front. And by the way, I think this is the stuff that people that have not operated inside of a social platform like this don't.

28:23It's very easy to be judgmental from the outside and being in the middle of making these policies and understanding like how complicated it is, you know, to, and I always, the test I always give people is define hate speech for me. You define it. Tell me exactly how you would define it, you know, cause it is really complicated and then to enforce it obviously is like a whole other level, but that you, part of what I hear you saying is like that you had the courage both to stand up for what you thought was right, but also to stand up for what the team.

28:53was going to have to go through, you know, in order to implement something. Yeah, and exactly. And, you know, there were, and again, like lots of lessons for me, things I wish I'd done better in a moment. I think I did a poor job communicating and framing the issues. I did not do it at the appropriate strategic level, but.

29:15Yeah, there were situations where we had to advocate. I advocated for things that I thought were right for sure for my team, but also right for Facebook, things that I thought were right for the company. And again, not going back and claiming, I think there are areas where I was wrong or naive, et cetera. I will also say, I think what you said is really true. It is really easy to look at a variety of scenarios from the outside and say, gosh, that's a really easy decision. It's black and white.

29:44And I was this I am was this person I do all the time. I read something news. I see something. I'm like, oh, they're just cowards It is oftentimes very complicated and it is rare At least I've had a lot of scenarios where it's not like black and white. What's the right call? It's you have two very bad very bad paths very challenging paths with real lack of clarity on things. And so I have a new sense of like that experience, experiences I've had since, I guess a little bit more perspective for how complicated and challenging these things can be. Now that said, I also think there are lots of cases where people lack moral courage and it's, it is easier to do the thing that is, that doesn't come with a cost. And so I, I look back a lot of decisions, you know, decisions I've made in my career where I'd lack moral courage.

30:44Like straight up. Those are the ones I regret the most of anything I've done in my career in life. And I think we need more of that in companies. We need more of that in society. It is in rare supply. It's not easy, but gosh, we need it. And I think it is from a leadership perspective. People are inspired by that. They want it and they need it. Listen, you were widely regarded as one of the best managers and leaders at Facebook. And I remember Cheryl telling me that she knew that and that she knew that you were sort of like one of the best leaders that she had. And there was a moment when she did something to you, like she split your job in half. Will you just tell the story about that happening to you, both what it felt like and what you learned from it, like looking back on it? Yeah. So this goes back to...

31:46Gosh, I've probably been at Facebook for about a year and a half or so so it's let's call it 2010 somewhere in that range and I Worked for Cheryl and my responsibility at that point was managing a bunch of Facebook's customer-facing teams that supported users developers advertisers and you know funny when I first started at Facebook Cheryl came over about a month after I reported to work for her. She told me in my first one-on-one with her I'm so glad you're here, but I'm gonna level you. I mean, basically immediately. I'm like, awesome. What is leveling me? Sorry, I'm gonna hire someone over you. Like, I'm gonna basically hire someone who's more experienced and more competent, which not exactly what you're looking forward to hearing in your first one-on-one with your new manager, but I actually, at the time, I also totally got it. Like, I get it, you know? I understand it.

32:37But she didn't actually for two years and and it was really grateful or she gave me an enormous opportunity to kind of grow and the scope my role grew so you know grew to a point where you know managing this large global team and you come to and at the time Facebook is growing and scaling at an enormous rate So you know going from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of users and hundreds of countries the team has grown from 40 50 to I don't six seven hundred at this point and Cheryl calls me in, you know, as far as I know, things are going great. And Cheryl, you know, I've been weekly one-on-one and, you know, in one of those one-on-one, she tells me, you're doing a great job, and I'm gonna split your role, and I'm hiring someone else. And it's come again. Those two parts of the sentence don't seem to line up, but she had said, hey, look, like the, you are doing a great job, but the company is growing faster than your ability to scale.

33:36And that's no slight against you. We will be better. And you will be better from us hiring someone to take on the advertising piece. Because you ran user operations and support, and then you ran advertiser operations? That's right. Yeah. Advertiser side, and then the developer side, and the risk and payment. So I was lucky to have a pretty broad scope. And they were very different parts of the business. And yes, so Cheryl hired.

34:04You know this person in this incredible leader and for I was very lucky. She hired someone great But gosh, that was such a gut punch for me and I will never forget You know, we had a we had a Cheryl came and joined my management meeting to tell them hey Don's and which was I'm really grateful for Don's doing an amazing job But this is the right thing for the company and here's why it's good and blah blah blah and I was I was just like I was honestly devastated. I was like I This isn't good. This is clearly a step back. I have clearly failed. I remember Cheryl saying to me at the time, Don, you will be better. You will be better by virtue of this. You will be better at your job. You will find that this gives you the ability to focus. And honestly, at the time, I was like, that is all BS. That's what you say to the person whose job, like, stop. And if you would ask me at the time, across that team, how are things going? I would have probably said, like,

35:02Look, not perfect, obviously, but like, you know, eight out of 10. Like, we're doing really well. Team's doing great. Fast forward a year or two, looking back. We were at like a three or a four. And what Cheryl said was 100% right. Like that, she hired in someone great. You know, fortunate for me, he and I learned a ton from him. We were amazing partners.

35:27and I found out that the time that I now had to focus on those teams that I led allowed me to grow, allowed me to be that much better and probably in the long run was the best thing for my personal career and very clearly the best thing for Facebook and so obviously so many people go through this and you know I know you talk about you know giving up your Legos and how important that is like not only is it the right thing to do for the organization but often it's the best thing for you as well and having the the patients, and that is a true test of your humility. Can you swallow that and then show up the next day and be like, all right, let's get back to work on it. Yeah. So you just talked about an experience a lot of people go through, right? Like someone bringing in a boss above them or taking your job in half, like splitting your job in half, and having a very normal emotional reaction to it. When someone comes to you and says,

36:26What do I do? Like this just happened to me. What do I do? What are the things that you tell them? Yeah. So I always share my experience because I think oftentimes just hearing the fact, like just knowing that someone else has gone through something like that. And again, having that perspective, it normalizes it. It helps you. Like it just makes it so much easier for folks. And you know, and then I'll, I'll try to share with them. Like, look, I can't guarantee this is good for you, but here's how it ended up good for me.

36:57And then often I'll just say, look, you have a couple of choices. Like you're a fork in the road in your career. And I'll tell you, I felt sorry for myself. Didn't help me. You can choose to feel sorry for yourself. That will not help you. Give yourself the space to work through the emotion. And then you have a decision to make. And look, I know you didn't choose this, but you can choose how you want to respond now. You can make the best of it. You can do everything in your power to make this.

37:26a positive step forward in your career or you can leave. But don't do it initially. Don't do it out of emotion. Be thoughtful about that decision and recognize this is not explicitly a step back. This happens to so many people. And I would say that's the biggest mistake that people make is they make an emotional decision in the moment.

37:58Um, that leads to actually a bad outcome for themselves. And, you know, it can be a real opportunity for growth if you think about it the right way. I want to talk about what leadership under pressure looks like. Cause I don't think, you know, most managers and leaders never face life or death situations. Can you just talk about a moment when you really felt that life or death pressure and those kinds of stakes and what happened? Sure. You know, there.

38:26various scenarios in Afghanistan and Iraq where you understand as part of the work that there are the circumstances are profound Generally in most these situations again, you're dealing with an enormous amount of uncertainty and there are a swirl of emotions from candidly some excitement to you know anxiety and fear and all of those things and And you have an environment where humans are still humans where there's organizational conflict and there are tensions and in Iraq you know I was a tune commander with this first force reconnaissance unit and I worked for someone where there were some real challenges there were some areas where I think there was not often not alignment on I think principled valued based decisions not alignment on

39:23the right tactical or strategic decisions for the organization, the world of cultural challenges. And I was a young, it had a massive impact on an organization. We had all of the stress of the ramifications of what we were doing to the risks to a bunch of really challenging organizational dynamics where you had You know, my Marines were angry about this leader and my peers were angry about and it was really having a negative impact on the on the culture within the organization. And, you know, I remember reflecting back on that now about how I showed up in that and the role that I played and as someone who was, you know, this was my boss and I found myself getting very, very frustrated in a very unconstructive way.

40:14by that dynamic by our disagreements and I remember having a moment where that kind of finally hit me and I'd say leading up to that moment I would say I let my frustration with him and the circumstance impact how I showed up as a leader in a really unconstructive way that had a negative impact on on my ability to lead our Marines so I would write it off as you know I would blame him and I would get angry at him and I'd find myself fighting him just on principle, these organic personal dynamics. I'd find myself feeding when other people would complain about it. It was easy to like lean into that. And then I had this moment where I was just honestly kind of ashamed of myself. Like, wow. And then I remember just thinking to myself, I don't know what hit me, but I had this moment of like, what are you doing?

41:07You are making the situation worse the way you are showing up is going to drive worse outcomes so your your your ego and You know in that case my lack of maturity I let that get to me and You know rather than thinking about okay. I have this very hard situation. I have this conflict with someone That is a part of my reality, but I get to choose How I show up in this and I can choose to be petty and fight this guy Or I can choose to manage those emotions and think about given the misalignment we have given our point of view on this How do I show up in a way that drives the best outcomes for our unit for our mission for my Marines and You know it's I think about that quite often because I've been I've had that some version of that a thousand times since like we all

42:04we all have situations where there's interpersonal conflict or there are things that don't go your way and it's so human and so easy to use that excuse or let that control the way that you show up and surrender in your agency in some respects and you know in that moment you know again it I learned a bit that like gosh I I can still control how I show up and that's what I should be accountable for You're actually explaining something to me that I've never really been able to crystallize before, which is just this idea that like high pressure and high stakes lead to sort of more chances for you to be your worst self in some ways. And so like it sounds like you now are more aware of those triggers that you saw so much of it both in the military and after that you can tell when the stakes are high and sort of the world is.

42:58Maybe pushing you around a little to sort of Yeah, maybe make you behave in a way that you weren't proud of you know Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, and I think being and you know, I considered myself to be on the margin a I don't know Stoic is the right word but I think I do a decent job of managing Most of the time my emotions but but they're there for sure and they're I also know for me I have triggers And different people react different ways. There are things for me that get me from zero to ten on emotion quickly. And I'm more conscious of what those things are now. And then there are things I think over time where you learn, but there are things that you can do to create space for yourself to manage and channel the emotion. Most of it, honestly, is awareness and time. Just something as simple of giving yourself, you're in a meeting, things are getting hot.

43:53Most of the time you don't need to say the thing or make the decision You have time and space and you can feel your when I feel myself getting emotional That's a little bit of a signal to pump the brace Give yourself time and space. Let the Emotions subside of that so you can be a little more clear-headed about how you choose to react. Thank you Don fall. Thank you. I mean every time we talk I learn from you and I don't know What is it about you that always makes me want to be a better person?

44:23Well, thank you for having me on. This was so fun. Tansika Sungmanivong, and Ashley Murphy. If you like the show and want more, come join the discussion on my sub-stack lessons. I'm Molly Graham. Thanks for listening.