What pressure can teach you about leadership with Don Faul

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3:21Explore further at rangerover.com. your job as a leader is to support and serve your people it's almost the you know when i was a a more naive leader i thought it was the opposite um you know that my people were there to kind of support me but you know the leadership you know in the marine corps and and and this is still you know philosophy that i try to aspire to i think is about 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. My first job out of college was leading wilderness expeditions for a school called Knowles.

4:02I 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. When 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.

4:47I've thought about that experience a lot over the years because 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, and 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.

5:39After 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, where 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. When 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.

6:28And 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. I'm curious in your experience, what does great leadership actually look like? It's funny. What you described there is when I was a young leader, what I thought I had to be.

7:17And when I was young, 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? 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 you know I think it probably took me personally gosh 15 years I'd say you know I spent six years in the Marine Corps you went back to grad school you know transitioned into technology I think it was really if I did to really pin it down is 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.

8:00It's about humility and recognizing that you 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 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 graduated high school and ended up enrolling at 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.

8:53So I studied systems engineering, and on top of that, you do a bunch of curriculum and experiences in and around leadership, military knowledge tactics. I 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 and 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.

9:32You 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, you know, that unit's mission was a combination of gathering information. So reconnaissance, you know, putting small teams out to gather information, you know, on the battlefields and then a mix of, you know, what they call direct action, which can be, you know, 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.

10:11Will you just tell us a little bit? Like, give me some context. I've never even asked you half these questions. Good. Yeah, so I graduated from the Naval Academy in 1998. I went and did a year of 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 in terms of the U.S. military. And what that means is that the Marine Corps can deploy, does deploy forces in partnership with the Navy in forward operating theaters.

10:54So 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.

11:32We spent a couple of days in East Timor doing some humanitarian work. And then we deployed to the Arabian Gulf for 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. Okay, so 9-11 happens. What a crazy moment to experience leaders trying to grapple with the fact that everything just changed.

12:19Were you a leader at that time or were you, so how did, can you tell us a little bit about how that day happened and what happened? Sure. You know, in 2001, I was a 23, 24 year old, probably a first Lieutenant. So that's the second rank. I was responsible for a platoon of Marines. So roughly 30 Marines, we had mechanized infantry, so armored vehicles, four armored vehicles. And my job was kind of leadership, um, you know, of that group. And, uh, most of, you know, what you do in the military when you're not at war is training and preparation. Um, and so most of your job is making sure that you're ready for what, you know, you may be confronted with.

13:00Um, in, we were in Australia actually on a, we 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 in I think about 45 days since we had left San Diego. We 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 in that we knew for us the implications.

13:45We 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. Yeah. And 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.

14:22We probably not the greatest timing. We had to scramble to get 3000 Marines who are spread all across Darwin back on ship. We left, I think at like seven or eight the next morning. So, um, 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 we were spinning a bit, you know, and, you know, trying to make sense of what was actually happening and what that meant for us.

15:02We ended up in the Arabian Gulf. General Mattis, actually Secretary Mattis, you know, 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. And as you can imagine at the time, there was a mix of all sorts of different emotions, a lot of uncertainty, you know, 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, you know, thinking and fear and all of that.

15:42You know, there's certainly, of course, some of that. But it was really then about, okay, now we know a mission's coming. How do we make sure we're ready? Okay. 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 100 miles south of Kandahar. And we started doing, you know, that was the initiation of combat operations for us.

16:24And we eventually moved into Kandahar Airport, International Airport. And we seized that in Kandahar and we established that as, you know, a base for humanitarian operations, some of the security operations. And then we started bringing in the U.S. 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 in 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.

17:08and I remember having just this stark moment of looking around and realizing every single one of my rings is looking at me right now and 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.

17:44So I learned that in a really significant sort of way. You know, and then the 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, what 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 servant leadership in the Marine Corps all the time. This notion of your job as a leader is to support and serve your people.

18:22It's almost the, you know, when I was a, 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 a philosophy that I try to aspire to, I think is about 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.

18:56I serve for you. You know, small story, General Mattis would walk the lines. You know, I would walk the lines to check on my Marines at night to make sure they were awake and paying attention, et cetera. And, you know, 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 does he have what he needs. And, you know, the impact that had on those Marines was really profound and I'll never forget that.

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21:35I'm Josh Noble, sports editor at the Financial Times. And a few months ago, I started thinking about how technology is changing sports. I wanted to understand whether technology is fundamentally transforming sport as we know it. It's like going from the Stone Age, you know, like to modern times, the way we used to cut weight, the way we used to train, the way we used to do strength conditioning. This is a huge step forward for us. Listen to Tektronic, rewiring sports, wherever you get your podcasts.

22:13I 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, you know, when I talk to folks who have not served and I understand why, you know, that there, 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.

22:50We don't just tell people what to do. I'm like, no, that's actually not how the Marine Corps works either. You know, the, I think the Marine Corps in general, um, philosophically really believes in this notion of servant leadership. Right. So you'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. 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.

23:30and 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, you know, come from an environment where you can get that input and that perspective. And often, you know, in the military, and the military needs to enable decentralized decision-making. You know, 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, you know, potentially at times unreliable communication and they had to make decisions.

24:19And 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 and 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 at the Naval Academy as a freshman, they call you pleads 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 when someone addresses you there are only four things you can say you know yes sir or 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 had lived my life making excuses for things that didn't go right.

25:21And you just learn in the military, you, you know, to say, you find a way or make one. And when I was coming out of the Marine Corps, you know, I came off of that, you know, almost six years of active duty in 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. Um, I had this military experience, but to me it was, it felt very foreign. Um, I 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. We were looking for some of five, seven years of consumer technology experience.

25:56I 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 I have found over time, 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.

26:35I'm really grateful to my military experience for teaching me that. Yeah. I also love the theme of taking responsibility for what you can control, which I do think is, it's 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 the no excuse, sir. Trying to teach that to my kids, but it's not going well, let me tell you. Um, will you just talk a little bit about like the transition from the military to, uh, 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, uh, the culture shock or just like what translated and what didn't.

27:23Sure. Yeah. So I, um, I decided to get out of the Marines, um, after I got back from Iraq and I'd loved 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 line of code. I didn't, I, you know, there was nothing practical there. Um, 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.

27:58And then this, uh, overwhelming, oh my God, what am I going to 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. Um, and, 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, 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.

28:36He was like, he was an operations leader, but he, you know, would write code on the weekends and built just a brilliant guy who knew technology inside and out. He's also a great manager and leader. Um, but I was so intimidated and he's like, Don, your project for the summer at Google is you're going to be working on the AdSense API. And I'm like, awesome. That sounds really interesting. And then I had to go look up what APIs would because I had absolutely no idea. And I remember like the day before my first day at work there, I was terrified. I'm like, I am going to make a fool of myself. I know nothing about technology.

29:10I don't know how I got this internship. And then I had this just incredible summer. And, you know, I think what I learned at that point was I 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 I learned, people are people, you know, and from a leadership perspective, while, you know, I knew that the cultural context was different and the language was different.

29:49And I'd say there was more of an expectation from people to be a part of the conversation and have the conversation, you know, 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, you 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 it took me – certainly it took me a while to learn a lot about the industry, to learn a lot about the job itself.

30:29But I was really pleasantly surprised to find that so many of the things that I had learned as a young leader – and there were a few places at age 21 at a college where you get to manage 30 people under challenging circumstances. So I was super fortunate to have the opportunity to do that. 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. So fast forward a bunch of years. Actually, when we were working at Facebook together, I was – my team had responsibility for content policy and a whole bunch of content moderation.

31:13and you know 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 you know how challenging it was to to build a set of policies and an infrastructure that scales that creates that is replicable that creates a safe environment for people and and 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.

31:47And I was, you know, 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. And 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 had done our best to figure out, okay, you know, how do we build a philosophical foundation for our policies?

32:29Our general approach was that, hey, we generally want it to be based on, you know, principles around free speech and what you could say in any street corner in the U.S. 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 by people all over the world. So very, very extraordinarily challenging problem that these platforms are still wrestling with today.

33:07It'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, 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.

33:50And, you know, I had do advocate for what I thought was the right approach for both the platform and for my team. And it didn'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.

34:25It's very easy to be judgmental from the outside and being in the middle of making these policies and understanding how complicated it is. The test I always give people is define hate speech for me. You define it. Tell me exactly how you would define it. Because it is really complicated. And then to enforce it obviously is like on 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 was going to have to go through, you know, in order to implement something. Yeah.

34:59And, and exactly. And, and, you know, there were, and, and again, like lots of lessons for me, things I wish I'd done better in the moment. I think I did a poor job communicating and framing the issues. I did not do it at the appropriate strategic level, but yeah, there were situations where we had to advocate. I advocated for things that I thought were right for, for, for sure for my team, but also right for Facebook. I thought 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, what you said is really true.

35:37It 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. And I was, I am, was this person. I do it all the time. I read something in the 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, and so I have a new sense of like that experience experiences I've had since, I guess a little bit more perspective, um, for how complicated and challenging these things can be.

36:29Now 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 at a lot of decisions, you know, decisions I've made in my career where I'd lack moral courage, like straight up. Those are the ones I regret the most of anything I've done in my, in my career and 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.

37:04They want it and they need it.

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39:54Listen, 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 talk a little, 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, gosh, I had 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.

40:33And 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 going to level you. I mean, basically immediately. I'm like, what is leveling? I'm going to hire someone over you. Like I'm going to make, I'm going to 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.

41:12But I actually, at the time, I also totally got it. I get it. I understand it. But she didn't actually for two years and was really grateful to her. She gave me an enormous opportunity to kind of grow and the scope of my role grew. So it grew to a point where managing this large global team and you'd 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 in hundreds of countries. The team has grown from 40, 50 to, I don't know, six, 700 at this point. And Cheryl calls me in, you know, as far as I know, things are going great.

41:52And Cheryl, you know, I have my weekly one-on-one and, you know, in one of those one-on-ones, she tells me, you're doing a great job. And I'm going to split your role and I'm hiring someone else. and 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. And 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. And - Because you ran like, you ran user operations and support and then you ran advertiser operations?

42:33That'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 yeah, so Cheryl hired this person in, this incredible leader in. I was very lucky. She hired someone great, but gosh, that was such a gut punch for me. And I will never forget, we had a, Cheryl came and joined my management meeting to tell them, hey, Don's, 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.

43:08And 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 in, you will be better as 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, you know, if you would ask me at the time, like across that team, how are things going? I would have probably said like, look, not perfect, obviously, but like, you know, eight out of 10, like we're doing really well.

43:49Team's doing great. Fast forward a year or two, looking back, we were at like a three or a four. And what, what Cheryl said was a hundred percent, right? Like that she hired in someone great, you know, fortunate for me. He and I, I learned a ton from him. We were amazing partners. Um, and I found out that the, the, the time that I now had to focus on those teams that I led, uh, 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.

44:32Like, 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 patience and that is a true test of your humility. Yeah. Right. Like, can you swallow that and then show up the next day and be like, all right, like, you know, let's get back to work on it. So. Yeah. So, you know, you just talked about, you know, 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, um, and having a very like normal emotional reaction to it. When someone comes to you and says, what do I do?

45:09Like 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. And then often I'll just say, look, you have a couple of choices. Like you're a fork in the road in your career.

45:45And 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 a positive step forward in your career, or you can leave.

46:14But 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 that leaves 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, because 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?

47:05Sure. You know, there are various scenarios in Afghanistan and Iraq where you understand as part of the work that there are the circumstances are profound. Generally, most of 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 you have an environment where humans are still humans, where there's organizational conflict and there are tensions. And in Iraq, I was a platoon commander with this first force reconnaissance unit and I worked for someone where there were some real challenges.

47:54There were some areas where I think there was often not alignment on, I think principled, value-based decisions, not alignment on right tactical or strategic decisions for the organization. There were 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 my Marines who 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 by that dynamic by our disagreement.

48:59And 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 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 personal dynamics. I'd find myself feeding when other people would complain about it. It was easy to like lean into that and be like, yeah. And then I had this moment where I was just honestly kind of ashamed of myself.

49:40Like, wow. And then I remember just thinking of my, I don't know what hit me, but I had this moments of like, what are you doing? You are making the situation worse. The way you're 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, um, 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?

50:36And I think about that quite often because I've had that some version of that a thousand times since like we all we 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 an excuse or let that control the way that you show up and surrendering 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 high pressure and high stakes lead to more chances for you to be your worst self in some ways.

51:27And so 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 maybe 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 I, you know, I consider myself to be on the margin a, I don't know if stoic is the right word, but I think I do a decent job of managing most of the time my emotions, but they're there for sure. And they're, I also know for me, I have triggers and different people react different ways.

52:09There are things for me that get me from zero to 10 on emotion quickly. And I'm more conscious of what those things are now, you know, and then there are things I think over time where you learn like, 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. Most of the time you don't need to say the thing or make the decision. You have time and space. And if 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 it.

52:50So 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 learned from you and I don't know. What is it about you that always makes me want to be a better person? Well, thank you for having me on. This was so fun. Work Life is a production of Ted and Pushkin Industries. This episode was produced by Isaac Carter and Leah Rose. Banban Chang is our story editor. Mixing by Hansdale Shi. Ted's executive producer is Daniela Bollarezzo. Constanza Gallardo is the executive producer for Pushkin. Special thanks to Roxanne Hylash, Valentina Bohanini, Lainey Lott, Tansika Sunmanivong, and Ashley Murphy.

53:39If you like the show and want more, come join the discussion on my Substack lessons. I'm Molly Graham. Thanks for listening.

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55:48Want to know how the global economy is changing? Closing the Strait of Hormuz is kind of like a geoeconomic cluster munition. Find the answers to the world's biggest questions. Is AI going to increase productivity growth and make us massively more rich than we are today? Or get the inside line on the superpower struggle? Ultimately, decoupling is a fantasy and we pursue it at our peril. Tune in to my Financial Times podcast, The Economics Show with Samaya Keynes, every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.