Emma Grede

Clarity is the most respectful thing that you can offer someone.

Now, I want to tell you about something that happened that I think actually illustrates this perfectly.

Now, a few years back, I had one department at one of the companies where the staff turnover literally made no sense at all.

It was unbelievably and exceptionally high, completely out of whack with the rest of the business.

And the rest of the business was already running pretty high because given the pace of growth, given that you're in a high growth company, turnover, it isn't unusual that in a hyper growth business, turnover would be super, super high.

But this division was different.

In this division, people just kept leaving.

I'd hired an exceptional leader and somebody with more than 20 years of experience.

She was excellent at hiring.

She brought on so many incredible executives, but she was incapable of letting one bad actor go.

She kept one bad egg in a job and that one person was creating severe dysfunction and driving the other good people that she'd hired out of the door one by one.

She had too much loyalty to the bad egg.

They'd started around the same time and they'd bonded over a similar background.

So she found it impossible to give that particular person feedback and then tolerated bad behavior.

As a result, she frustrated so many great staffers and tore her own team apart.

In the end, I had no choice.

I had to let both of them go.

I chalked that enormous loss, five team members out the door, up to one person who just couldn't give good feedback.

This plays out with women specifically, and I see it on my teams.

I've observed that many women are overly concerned with other people.