Resolving conflict and building startup employees' careers for the long-haul — Flatiron’s Alex Buder Shapiro

[00:00:00] The interesting thing for me about couples therapy is that it's presumes that both individuals have made at least an initial commitment to be together. Workplace relationships are so interesting because as much as we can do in an interview, We still learn most about the people that we are working with once you get there.

And so one of the things that's interesting for me about couples therapy books is that they ground a lot in, what did you see in the beginning? What was it that brought you here and why does that drive the work that you're doing in the session?

[00:00:39] Welcome to in depth, a new show that surfaces tactical advice, founders and startup leaders need to grow their teams, their companies and themselves. I'm Brett Berson, a partner at first round, and we're a venture capital firm that helps startups, like Notion, Roblox, Uber, and square tackle company building firsts through over 400 interviews on the review.

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For today's episode of in-depth. I'm really excited to be joined by Alex Buder Shapiro. Alex is the chief people officer at Flatiron Health, a company that focuses on accelerating cancer research and improving patient care. Alex first joined Flatiron in 2016 after an eight year stint on Google's people, operations team, where she supported leaders and global teams, as they approached org design, performance management and incentives.

Before her promotion to Flatiron's executive team this past March Alex previously ran the HR business partner and employee relations team. As the company scaled rapidly. I really enjoyed today's conversation because we explored so many different facets of what it means to both be a people leader and a long tenured employee at a fast growing startup.

We kick things off by talking about an area where people leaders tend to spend a lot of their time. We kick things off by talking about an area where people leaders tend to spend a lot of their time helping others resolve interpersonal conflict. Alex talks us through the pattern she's seen across her career, including what's at the root of communication issues and the heuristics.

We can lean on to reframe our perspectives. From why she loves borrowing techniques from the world of couples therapy to practical tips for deescalating conversations. I really loved the ideas she shared here. We also touch on the challenges of getting employees to stick around. Long-term at startups from hiring your own boss to navigating tough career conversations.

Alex shares, helpful advice. As well as more about her own journey, rising through the ranks from IC to executive at Flatiron. Her experiences mean that she's also seen the growing pains that come with scaling firsthand things like the challenge of selling your new role with an elevator pitch when you first join or the danger of locking into people, processes and frameworks too early.

Obviously there's tons of takeaways here for people leaders at companies of all sizes. But I also think managers and leaders in any function will pick up several really great lessons. I really hope you enjoyed this episode. And now my conversation with Alex first, we're super excited to do this. So thank you for 

So happy to be here. This is a really important resource. I think for a lot of our company, we have been an avid reader of the review, and many people love the podcast as well. 

[00:04:10] One of the areas I thought we could maybe start talking about is some of your ideas around communication and resolving conflict, which I think sometimes it's maybe a little bit under explored from a people perspective, but I think.

Is the core of the way that we relate, connect and understand each other. And one of the things that you have worked on is this idea of being able to hear and coach the same conversation from different angles. I thought we could use that as a jumping off point to explain what you mean by that and some of the things you've learned.

[00:04:40] Absolutely. So when I transitioned to Flatiron Health, which was about five years ago now, and the company was around 230 or so employees, my role was primarily working with our leadership team and emerging leaders and managers within the company. Well, what I hadn't had the opportunity to do coming from a really large environment was basically get to talk to every single person in a conversation about what they felt like had happened in that conversation.

And some of that was just size and scale, right? We weren't that big. We weren't talking about that many individuals. And so when a conflict happened or a disagreement, everyone would seek out my thoughts on what had happened. And by the end of the day or the week, I'd heard the same story from three or four different individuals

and that was this light bulb moment for me around communication, because essentially I heard three or four different stories, even if it was all the same conversation and it got my wheels turning. Why is it that this conversation has been perceived and portrayed in so many different ways where that led me was really into research around cognitive heuristics and how we process information.

And so for folks who aren't as familiar. Your brain is taking in millions and zillions of data points at any given time and cognitive heuristics or the shortcuts that it's using to process all of that information. So your brain needs to sort through that and decide what's relevant and decide what's salient and figure out how to take away a reasonable amount of information, and then move on to its next interaction.

And every individual is filtering any given experience through their own set of heuristics and anchoring on information that might match some of the thoughts they had going in. And they're seeking. We often talk about something called a confirmation heuristic. They're seeking out the data points that validate the impression that they have.

Or they've practiced a conversation. And so that is the more recent information that they have in their mind. And so in their mind, that's what transpired, even if they didn't end up making all the points. And so I'd get these three or four individuals coming back to me and saying, oh, this conversation did not go like I wanted.

And here's what happened. And I had this moment. Ah, but I can see what happened in this conversation because I've now heard that story from every angle. And maybe I can both coach the specific of the conversation as in ask some of the right questions to play through what did happen, but maybe I can also start to generalize some of those learnings so that I have my own toolkit of questions that I ask.

Even if I don't have the benefit at every single conversation of talking to everyone involved, maybe I can apply some learnings from this experience. And think through what are the questions that I ask and how do I help resolve conflict or bring things to more effectiveness just based on these insights and these learnings.

So I can share a little bit more about questions that I ask her, things like that. So, first of all, I always try to get people as much as possible to anchor on what was actually said in the conversation. It probably is something that we do very intuitively and without ever questioning ourselves. But you'd be surprised how many people actually, they put things into their own words.

And then the more that they retell it, they actually forget what was said. You'd hear someone say, oh, this person said that's never going to work. And I think, huh, that other person has never. Spoken like that that's not their language, but you've probably put it into your own words. And so bringing a person back to like, can you walk me through the points?

Can you walk me through what was said? Not just your interpretation, but can you walk me through what happened in that conversation? And then once you've grounded the person in that you have an opportunity to say your interpretation, very plausible could be exactly what happened, but is there anything else that could have been meant by that?

Were there any other things the person could have been referring to. Or could have been solving for, is there any other reason the person might've felt that way and just starting to open the person's aperture up a bit to consider what are the other things that may have been happening? It starts to weaken their resolve, that they know exactly what happened and they have the interpretation down pat, and they start to wonder, like, I don't know, maybe I don't feel as confident or maybe I jumped to an assumption.

And then, so I would say, what else could they have been solving for? And then as the person's wheels are turning, we basically often would come up. Maybe not a multitude, but several different things. It could have been that the person really wanted to own it themselves, but it also could have been that they were really concerned.

This other problem would emerge. If I was the one driving it, there starts to be some amount of reasonable person principle. If this person is coming at it from a reasonable place, there might be some other things that could have happened. And so that I started saying. How would you test out that theory?

If the person's not ready to meet you halfway that's okay. You don't have to put yourself out there yet, but is there a half step that you could take a question you could ask or a suggestion you can make and then you see what kind of response you get. And then that will help you learn. How much is the person actually doing what you originally thought that they were doing versus how much have you interpreted what the person is doing through your own lens and through the way you see the world and asking that clarifying question, it helps you to actually see.

Could have been occurring. And that's what I just started to get to do all the time. And it was so cool. Cause you have this bird's eye view of these interactions and people would come back and say like, oh yeah, it turned out that that person didn't need this thing at all. And I think great. I kind of knew that because I had talked to them afterwards, but it doesn't do any good if I know it, you have to know it and you have to learn how to work through it.

[00:10:05] This is one of my favorite topics, which is the story we tell ourselves about a situation or someone else. May be reflective of reality, or it might just be a story we're telling ourselves. Absolutely. And it's often at the root of potential conflict and a whole host of other things. And this both exists in the way in which we interface with one another.

But it's also the way that we think about our work or more broadly, our company, you were sort of sharing questions to ask yourself to help increase the likelihood that the story you're telling yourself. Is in fact, a reflection of reality. Are there other things that you've found are useful for people to keep in mind or to increase the probability that those two things are well aligned?

[00:10:49] So I think I mentioned a little about the reasonable person principle, which I, it's not a principle I invented, but it's a worldview that I fully endorse. I roughly believe that most people have the best of intent. And they have a strong desire to get to an outcome that is good overall and probably good for them, but also just good and right for the company and the organization and the people involved.

And so for me, anchoring yourself on that idea that I think we're all roughly working backward from the same end goal at the early days of a company, it might be success or profitability or the impact you can have on patients in the case of Flatiron, if you're starting with this reasonable person principle, which is that we are more aligned than we believe we are at what we are solving for in the end.

And then you work backwards to understand, well, why is it that that person might be solving for this thing in a different way than I am solving for it? What might motivate them? What problems might they be solving for? What principles might they be using to make their recommendation? I just think that you end up finding so much more areas of commonality in that assumption of positive intent and that assumption that people really do want at the end of the day for things to go well.

You're building a company from scratch. And I think if you can remember that everybody here wants that company to end up at its best. I think it helps to deescalate some of what happens in these conversations very quickly. It helps to reframe what another person might be pushing for advocating. So I use that one a lot too.

[00:12:31] Do you find that there are times where that doesn't work? 

[00:12:34] Well, I think it doesn't work a lot in the sense that sometimes people are so rooted in either the problem that they are living in. So for them, the salience and what I like to call the availability heuristic of what challenges they're up against, those are so heightened in their mind that the idea of any amount of trade-off feels uncomfortable.

It's harder than to say, like, yes, we all want the same thing, but you're not taking seriously the challenges or the problems of getting there. It doesn't work as much. Um, and that's where I think you start to employ things like first principles and how are we going to make this decision and what are the facts that we are using to drive the outcome we are at?

And I think that similarly, if you're not really aligned on where you're going. Or what that end state is beyond something like success or profitability. Those can mean very different things or have very different time horizons than if you haven't started with that begin with the end in mind, then you're going to make a different set of trade-offs.

So much of life and work is ultimately about trade-offs. And so if you don't know where you want to end up and you don't know some of the guiding factors that get you there, then even the most reasonable person with the most positive intent, they're going to get somewhere different than you are based on the available information that they have.

[00:13:53] books that you've read that have informed your ideas around 

[00:13:56] this? You know, I have to be honest. My favorite things to read are not in the HR or leadership space. I really enjoy reading about couples therapy books, and I really like a specific method. The Gottman method. And I think that in general couples therapy has just seen a lot of these techniques employed for maybe a longer period of time.

So there's just a lot more literature and material out there around how do you reframe a question or how do you put things within the perspective of yourself versus another? So that's probably where I do most of my reading. If at all, I'm probably more of like in general, a pattern recognition gal. What energizes me the most is to.

Digging in and trying to find commonalities with what I've seen before. But if you have books, I would love the recommendation. 

[00:14:44] The one that touches on this probably the best is nonviolent communication. 

[00:14:49] It gets at this idea that we're constantly telling ourselves stories and that may or may not be a reflection of reality.

One of the best examples for me is always, you know, you're meeting with someone and they're 10 minutes late. And in one scenario you were trying to get something done and that 10 minutes was hugely valuable to you. And so you got the thing done and now you can go to the meeting. You're actually thrilled that it started 10 minutes.

Another one is that you were sitting there for 10 minutes and the story you're telling yourself as this person's an asshole. They don't respect my time. They don't respect me. They think they're more important than me, the same behavior that happened to you, but you're processing it in entirely different ways, based on nothing it has to do with the actual individual.

And the book really explores these ideas, which I just think is profoundly important into your point in every facet of life. In your exploration of couples, books, and couples therapy and how couples can build thriving relationships. Are there other concepts that you've picked up that you find yourself applying all of the time?

[00:15:57] So I think the interesting thing for me about couples therapy is that it presumes that both individuals have. At least an initial commitment to be together. And so where I like to tease out some of the application is workplace relationships are so interesting because as much as we can do in an interview process, we still learn most about the people that we are working with once you get there.

And so one of the things that's interesting for me, Couples therapy books is that they ground a lot in, what did you see in the beginning? What was it that brought you here and why does that drive the work that you're doing in the session or in the dialogue? And for me, that is the translation of first principles that you will see now, I think govern a lot of how companies end up working.

So some of the strategies that I've seen are actually, you know, how do you kind of return to what's core and essential, and sometimes that's easier to do. In conversation using some of the tactics I've read about. So what drew you here in the first place? What were the things that you most saw in the first place?

Sometimes it seems kind of funny for folks or at least like when I first started asking some of those questions to people, one person even said to me, Oh, gosh, this is like couples therapy. And I was like, actually, yes, that is exactly what I am doing right now. I am trying to improve the relationship dynamic that you have.

And I don't have a ton of literature on how to do that in the workplace. I think there's honestly been an explosion in the past five, 10 years in this space, but especially when I first started really getting energized by this, I would have to just name for people. Yeah. This is a relationship. And if you think about the tropes of couples therapy, even if it's just framing something as from yourself and not as a fact, that's going to work really well in this conversation as well.

So I'm not sure that they were anything that was unique or revolutionary, but I actually think contextualizing what it means to actually be in a relationship with somebody into a workplace dynamic and understanding that the sheer amount of time that you're going to spend talking to that other individual, well, might in some weeks outpace that of your spouse or any other individual in your then I think returning and grounding to what brought you there in the first place and bringing yourself in as that individual.

[00:18:13] One of the things that's so funny is that there's often these conflicts or issues or frustrations or dissatisfaction at work. But what we forget is that most people in every other facet of their life have the same thing. Statistically, half of marriages fail. So most people or a meaningful percentage of people are not in functional, healthy relationships.

And so it's interesting how we often separate these things, but it's no surprise that if half of marriages fail, then there's going to be a lot of issues or angst or dysfunction in the workplace. And a lot of times I think we're more harsh or less forgiving in our professional context than we are at times in our personal context.

But at the end of the day, it's, we're all coexisting with other people. We seem to forget how interlocking those things are and not even bring yourself to work, or if you have issues at home, how does that come and show up at the workplace, it's more just these concepts of communication. How do we work through things together that are probably nearly identical, but we don't see them that way.

[00:19:12] Right. That is the heart of what I feel like I do for a living. If people could communicate effectively together, we'd have world peace. We'd have a lot of things. Maybe not world peace. I sometimes joke, why do I have job security? I have job security because people just inherently tend to misunderstand each other.

And I believe that the things that will get us to the place of engaged and effective workplaces are really the same things that would get us to world peace, too. It just so happens that no one's entrusted me with that yet, yet. Instead I have my own little micro universe that I get to try to make the best place possible.

[00:19:47] You're own civilization, switching gears a little bit. I thought it would be interesting to talk about long tenured employees at a startup and the different pitfalls or ways in which that ends up working and. Because you've been at Flatiron for a long time since the early days. And I'm sure you've seen a lot of people come up and a lot of people leave over time.

I was interested in kind of your reflection on when, when someone is at a startup for five or six years and it goes through rapid growth and they're still there and it's working well. What are the conditions or what's unique about what the company did or that person. That makes that work. 

[00:20:36] It's a great, I actually think I saw it at Google too.

Not that I would have ever called us a startup, but from when I joined to, when I left, we also grew about four or five X. I think there's a lot of expectation alignment that has to happen for it to work really well. And when I say that, I mean that the company's growth is aligned. I think, with where the employee.

Once in terms of new amounts of impact or challenge. Or personal opportunity. And so just to put some more specifics around that, there are some people who really enjoy early days of building something from scratch, and once it needs to be scaled or maintained, or once it needs to be sustained in a way that other things can be built on it, that doesn't feel as energizing for them, both in terms of what they do, but in terms of how they see themselves.

So conflicts with their identity. And where I've seen long tenured employees really enjoy Flatiron is where they see that each time you master one challenge, it unlocks a new incremental challenge. And then for them it's like they can stay put and continue to have a bigger hairier thing to solve and see their own career grow from that.

I think that's actually very true of my own career and my own expectations in terms of the evolution over the years. 

[00:21:58] So if a CEO is coming to you and saying, we're growing really quickly, we want to create an environment where our early employees can thrive for many years. What advice would you give them or how do they set up the system that increases the probability that what you just said actually happens 

[00:22:16] a huge amount of it is communication.

This will be my broken record breath. The whole time we talk, how you talked about the expectations with the person from the day that. So do they think that they are joining to do exactly what a company is doing at that moment? Do they think they are joining. This aspirational end state, or do they think they're a part of getting it from here to there?

I think if an employee doesn't think that it is their job to create the reality that they want to live in, then there's going to be misalignment because the reality that they're in right now is going to change and the end state may take a really long time. And so they need to feel really bought into the idea that they want to get from here to there.

And they want to be that person every step of the way who sees things change. As a result of whatever has been accomplished to date. So I think again, from a communication standpoint, if they feel like the job that they're doing today is perfect. Then if that's hard, cause that's going to change. And if they feel like the job they're doing today is not right for them, but maybe one day it will be, then that's hard because we don't know the future.

And so we don't know where we're going to go, but if they feel like for a certain period of time, I have visibility into the types of activities I'll be doing. And then if I'm successful at those things that will unlock a new set of things that I get to do and so forth. And so I think you have to both design your recruiting process with that incremental evolution in mind.

And then you have to think about once a person gets to the company, how do you follow through on that? So how do you keep a fairly open dialogue around what the person is. Looking for expecting and interested in. And I think so much of it is, is the conversation with the manager. I think there are frameworks up the wazoo, but it doesn't make any difference if they're not followed through by a pretty active dialogue.

So I think from a CEO standpoint, you can create that culture where it's okay to talk about things that aren't happening yet, or things that a person wants that might not happen. I think the long-tenured employees that feel really energized after having been there for awhile, they've pulled through the threads of those conversations year after year or change after change, they've accepted where some of those things won't happen, but they've continued to see that the company's success is their own success and that the more that they work towards something that's right over all the more, it would create a new ability for them to impact something at that next level for themselves as well.

[00:24:44] So when you think about. Communicating in a very high quality way around this. Can you think back in the last couple of years, maybe a conversation you had with someone where you thought you did a really good job of this, and what did that look like? Or what were the contents of that conversation 

[00:25:01] as an individual leader or for me coaching another organizational leader.

Maybe I'll start with coaching another leader. I think one of the things that's really interesting for me is how much people feel the need to. Like what they are currently doing. And so when I've thought about the contents of a conversation that opened up, what are your expectations? Some of it had to start with the permission in that given conversation to not like things that you are currently doing.

Sometimes that has to start by creating some shared vulnerability, but sometimes that can just be, we're not solving for. Tomorrow in this conversation. And I appreciate that. You're mature enough to understand that I don't have a magic wand or a crystal ball. And so if there are things that you don't like, that doesn't mean that they're going away, but let's have this conversation based.

I mean, at least a 10% more aspirational way. I think that's like really core to the beginning of the conversation. Otherwise people often come in and they just say, oh, well, this is great. And that's great. And I want to do more of the same, one thing that I like. So that permission in the very beginning to be that 10% more aspirational, that's like a very starting point of it.

And then I think some of it is this idea that the conversation itself is really rooted in active listening and that the manager has to be willing to hear what the person is saying. Play back to make sure that they understand it. And then. Pull on some of the threads and say, like, in this example that I'm thinking of in my head, the person actually needed to line up two of the statements that the person was making like, Hey, I know you want to have more ownership and drive these things forward, but I also know that you find it sort of draining to be the single accountable leader on that.

And those two things don't have to be in conflict, but they can be. So I want to line up those two statements for you and. What is the energizing part of owning it? That doesn't exist for you as much, if you feel like you're the only point of accountability and play those things back, that's active listening for me because I think a lot of times managers want a template of questions that they can ask in advance.

The conversations will feel really formulaic as a result. You know, what are the things you like and what don't you like? And then what if we did more of that thing and less of this thing. But I think that if you're not digging in on what the person is giving you and using it to hold the mirror up in that conversation.

So usually when I'm coaching, I say like, I don't want to tell you too much in advance, but I want to tell you to listen out to where there are divergences and what a person is giving you. Strongly held notions that need to be unpacked a bit more, a person might say, I want to be a people manager that comes up in a lot of conversations.

And if you don't spend a bit of time on why that person wants to be a people manager and is that driven from reasons that are within control or out of control, and you don't get the opportunity to go that next order deeper than I think you end up as a manager coming out of the conversation with your own confirmation bias of like, okay, I got exactly what I needed out of that conversation and I know exactly what to do, and it might not match up with what the employee hoped that he, or she would get to say during that conversation.

So again, thinking back to this one that I have in my mind, I think what had had happened in the past is that the employee had prepared herself to give certain data. And when they weren't coming out organically, I don't think she really had told herself in the past that nobody knew what those things were.

And so it was really an art of, Hey, is there anything you wish I'd asked or you had wanted to say, or that we didn't cover today? When I'm hearing back from you from this conversation is that you want more of. But without this. So we need to think about a way to disperse this and if I go forward and make that happen, like I want to make sure that actually matches what you were hoping to get out of today's conversation.

And so that for me is roughly how I often coach on 

[00:28:57] that. That's great. I quite like this conversation rapidly scaling startups with an eye towards early employees and their life cycle as the company grows and you're getting. If you think about the three or four patterns that come up. One of the ones that I noticed that happens all of the time is you're a 30 person company.

And let's say you have a marketing manager. And she's doing a fantastic job. You're then rapidly scaling to 150. You open a rec for a VP of marketing. And this person says, I want to be the VP of marketing I've contributed in this way. And they don't have the competency to do that at that given point in time.

And what tends to happen most of the time is they get hugely de-motivated and they end up leaving the company where the ideal scenario, at least for in the eyes of the company, maybe not in the employee is that they continue to have an impact in their area. And so they're a marketing manager. They do that.

You hire a great VP of marketing above them and everybody co-exists and it's all kumbaya. So that normally tends to be less often than that happens. And so I'd be interested. Are there ways that increase the probability that that is possible? I assume it's related to some of the concepts you were just sharing.

[00:30:04] Yeah. And if you want, I'm probably that success story. I can even tell you my own personal story and those moments for me, I'm joined Flatiron in 2016 as the company's first HR business partner and within about a year, it felt evident to myself and some of the other leaders on the people team that we needed, chief people, officer.

And we were all roughly around the same leveling, definitely different expertises amongst us. And we actually drove that search ourselves and hired in a chief people officer ourselves. And then you can of course, fast forward, three years later when she was ready to move on for her next thing, it. More of the time that I felt that I was ready and I guess others felt that I was ready.

Flatiron Health’s Chief People Officer Alex Buder Shapiro shares her lessons from scaling, including resolving workplace conflict with techniques from couples therapy and getting employees to stick around long-term at startups. 