Bryan Power
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Bryan Power’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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A lot of Google, a lot of my experience is you got to underestimate the tailwind the organization provides for you when it's really on this path of success. And so Square was the first time where I felt my personal, at the time I was leading recruiting and Square was going through a leadership transition where we really needed to bring in a lot of new leaders.
And, you know, that was my responsibility. Just like a be careful what you wish for moment. I had got this challenge where if I didn't do my job, the company was really going to feel it. And I'd never felt personally that level of stress before where if I failed, everyone around me was probably going to fail. The chances would really go up.
What I learned in that moment was I'd been stressed about myself and my own job before, you know, or my manager or my team. But I'd never really worried about company level stress for a long time because, again, Google was on this run. And so I had to learn to deal with these different aspects of stress.
And I remember the moment of being like, well, hey, do you want to just bail out or do you want to do what you signed up for? And so that began a few month run where we really rebuilt the leadership team at Square. I should say the next iteration of leadership is Square. that ultimately took the company public and really took it to new heights. And so I got that direct feedback I was looking for.
But I think everyone wants the success, but you have to go through the level of challenge you haven't dealt with before to really feel that come through. But I distinctly remember the moment sitting by myself and thinking about this level of stress was a lot and I'd never really dealt with it before.
Oh my goodness. There's so many things. I think what's been interesting in today's world as a leader is even as an optimist, which I subscribe myself to, I just believe we're on the path to a better future. it's a kind of a tough world. The politics in the US are certainly polarizing regardless of where you come down on the political spectrum.
There's a lot of things globally that are making people really anxious and it just feels more than normal. And so what I think that means is a lot of people turn to their company as the thing that they feel like they have some sense of impact or control on.
And so many people expect their organization is going to make their day-to-day better because of the fact that so much outside of their day-to-day world professionally is scary and intimidating and stressful.
And so that means leaders who have a tough enough time trying to go from A to B on your company level goals are also being asked to help people through this macro level stress problem, which fair or unfair is increasingly the expectation for a lot of people that their work is what's going to get them through this. Their professional identity is going to be a source of strength for them.
And so they look to leaders to really fulfill that. And that's very difficult, just given what is important to so many different people, how to play that role. in their day-to-day lives. So I definitely worry about that. I think that the nature of work has changed so dramatically since the COVID-19 pandemic four years ago.
in what people expect out of work, what it means to have a job, what it means to go to work or do work. All of these things have just been disrupted in a way that it's very hard to think about the last disruption at this level of the work experience going back decades. It's really been seismic. And I think people are still really sorting out what that means.
And so in the heart of your question, what I worry about, a lot of the big plates that just going to work and doing are built upon have really been moving around. So that makes it almost like three-dimensional chess of how to figure out, just to get your work done as a company, you've got to grapple with these other external factors that are really significant.
I think that one thing we learned, and I've been at Nextdoor the entire time. I started here two years before COVID. So my whole post-COVID, during COVID experience has been with Nextdoor. The only thing I felt really confident in, if you go back to 2019 and 2020, when we were really in the throes of lockdown and pre-vaccines and just the unknown,
was that a lot of people were quick to declare victory on what work was going to be, whether that was everyone's going to be fully remote, this is the future, or no, no, no, no, remote was just a fad, you got to get back. Like everyone just having these declarative statements that they knew, that was the only thing I knew was wrong, because it's just too seismic, it's too disruptive.
And seeing just past technical innovations, it's really hard to see when it's happening, the thing that's going to become the major longstanding success coming out of this. And so I think each year, what you've seen now is companies are just taking so many different approaches versus we all kind of used to do the same thing.
I think what's healthy is people are now narrowing in on what do they want their experience to be, what's right for them, for their company, for their size, for their values. And that's just creating a much richer landscape of employers or employment opportunities for people to pick between.
There's just trade-offs. If you're a remote company, you can hire in such a broader geographical area than if you want to hire in a place where you can bring everybody together all the time. If you want everyone in the office every day or four or five days a week, everyone at the company kind of needs to be able to get to the office that week.
So you can only hire within a certain circumference from where the office is. Versus remote, time zones become a factor, but that's like a much bigger... So it's like, what's more important to you? Is it the ability to get people together? Which I think for really small startups is really significant.
When you're a company of 20 people, if you can all just fit around one table or in one room, there's a velocity to that that I think is just dishonest to not say is real. Whether you need it or not is a different choice, but it is just fundamentally different if you're all in the same room together. But when you get bigger, you all can't fit in the same room.
And so you have different choices that you need to make. But I do think hiring has really changed in that one of the challenges in hiring before was people needed to take time off to interview. They had to go to an office to meet with everybody, which means you have to take a day off, which is kind of suspect if your manager is watching, like, where were you yesterday? And now it's just easy.
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