Managing Conflict Within Your Leadership Team with Henry Ward

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Henry Ward. Henry is the founder and CEO of Carta, which I think everybody in the world knows, but if not, Carta is the leading infrastructure platform for private markets. Henry has scaled his business tremendously over the, how long have you guys been around? 10 years.

Henry Ward: About 10 years. Yeah-

Matt Blumberg: 10 years. To about 2000 employees with about 35, 000 companies on the platform. And a staggering 2. 5 trillion in assets on the platform. Henry, welcome to the Daily Bolster. Good to see you.

Henry Ward: Yeah, good to see you again, Matt. Thanks for having me.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, absolutely. So my question for you today, since you operate at scale and operate with presumably a good- sized executive team, you're way beyond the founder and two or three people. I'm imagining you have eight to 10 people. How do you handle disagreements and conflict when you make decisions? As I think about sort of working the five dysfunctions model, that ability to discuss, debate, disagree, but then commit is so critical toward having a healthy executive team and the right goals and strategy and everything. So what is your formula for handling that?

Henry Ward: Yeah, I have a different perspective on this. I hear disagree and commit a lot, and I usually try to avoid that one for us because even though people can say they do it, they don't really, and so one of the things I learned from Andreessen Horowitz when I was working with them, Marc Andreessen shared this with me. He said, " At Andreesen Horowitz, they have this view that there are no bad ideas in the world, that it's a question of timing." And I won't do it justice. Marc is a history of technology and he walked me through all these examples. The first TV was actually invented in 1850, but they didn't have the cathode- ray technology to make it work until the 1900s. The first phone was actually built before Ben Franklin, but they didn't have the technology yet to commercialize it. And all these inventions had happened, even like before Instacart, but they didn't have the mobile app. So all of these inventions-

Matt Blumberg: actually 20 years before, right.

Henry Ward: 20 years too early. Exactly. And so he goes through this history and he goes, " So every idea was actually a great one. The problem was timing." And if you look at the world through this lens that all ideas are good ideas. It's not whether an idea is good or bad, the question is, " Is now the right time?" It completely changes the conversation. So at their IC committees or their investment, Monday morning investment partner meetings, they don't talk about is that a good idea or a bad idea, which is a very judgmental way to think about investing. What they all come into is assuming it is a good idea. The only question that they have to answer is, " Is now the time for that idea?" And I love that way of thinking. And so the operator version of that that I bring to the exec team is, " Hey, we're all right." Right. It's not a question when eight of us are around a table and we all have different opinions, we're all super smart. It's not a question of one person is dumb today and the other person's smart, or this person is right and that person is wrong. We're all correct. The question is aperture, which aperture are we looking at this decision through? If you're the head of marketing, you're looking at this decision through a different aperture than if you're the head of technology than if you're the head of legal. All three of you are correct in the aperture you have. So my debate here is not whether you're right or wrong or who is correct. The debate then becomes, we assume we're all correct. The debate then becomes, which aperture should we look through to make this decision? And then it becomes a very different conversation. Is this a decision where we want to look through the marketing aperture? Through the legal aperture? Through the technology aperture? Oftentimes through the aperture of the CEO. It happens all the time that the exec team thinks one thing and I think something else. We're both correct.

Matt Blumberg: Right. You have different lenses on the business.

Henry Ward: That's exactly right. And the lens I have is different than the exec team as it should be. And so sometimes, " Hey, we should look at this through the executive lens, and sometimes we should look at it through the CEO lens." And then that's the conversation we have. And so then when we do make a decision, everybody understands that it's not about somebody was right and somebody was wrong. It was just today, this is the aperture we're going to make the decision through.

Matt Blumberg: What happens if you have a second order disagreement. So hey, I think, no, I really think we should look at it through the marketing lens, and I really think we should look at it through the product lens. Is that any different? How do you break through that one?

Henry Ward: Yeah, so I think it becomes a question of how do we decide which lens to look through? And that becomes a really important question is which lens is the right lens for this decision? Which often elicits a whole set of conversations about what's important, what are we really thinking through?

Matt Blumberg: What's the decision criteria? That's probably an easier conversation to get through.

Henry Ward: A hundred percent because people aren't feeling like, " If I don't get my way, I am wrong or I lost." Right. And that's where people get entrenched, and that's the disagree and commit thing is that you are asking people who are entrenched to admit that they didn't get what they want. And that's the reframing you want to get people to.

Matt Blumberg: That's so interesting. I am reminded of one of my favorite sports quotes, which was from Vince Lombardi, the famous football coach for the Packers, who said, " I never lost a game. I only ran out of time." So it's a little bit like that. It's just not the right time for this Henry Ward from Carta. Thank you so much for sharing that. It's a great, great reframing of, I think one of the trickiest things that CEOs have to navigate. So thank you.

Henry Ward: Super. Thank you, Matt.