Danny: I think if you grow up with any kind of headwind or any sort of challenge, I think that it ends up creating some kind of motivation. So then for me, if I could see that my dad was, let's say, challenged to sort of realize his own full potential because of some of the challenges he had, then I think, as his son, I would be motivated to use the capabilities I have, sort of the lack of impediments, and realize my full potential. And so the manifestation of that could be very positive, very productive, sort of acting as a positive role model, being very approachable, being a consistent manager, or it could motivate you to try to become sort of like an outsized presence or an outsized success and do it on an almost overly accelerated timeframe because you're putting pressure on yourself to realize your own full potential.
Morra Aarons-Mele interviews Danny Bernstein
Morra: What does it feel like when you've helped create something that is so ubiquitous and you're just driving in the car and someone's using a product you've worked on, and you're like, "Oh my God, that's my work"?
Danny: There's a certain sort of feeling of a personal connection or vulnerability to it. If I'm working on something and it doesn't work properly, I actually feel like I personally let down that individual, and I try to debug it myself or try to figure that out. So from that standpoint, it can be quite humbling when things sometimes don't work. When they do, it's, of course, very satisfying, and you feel like you're solving a real problem for someone, helping them become more productive. But what's interesting about working at a place like Google is that, because our products are used by so many people, very often we have sort of false positives in the product. Like, we can launch something in Search, and 50 million people can use it immediately, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's successful or meeting user needs. So there's quite a bit of complexity in understanding really what is working and what isn't and how to read the signals and how to read the data. But I think that's part of the fun and part of the challenge.
Morra Aarons-Me...: So looking at this perch where you have such an impact, is this the kind of successful path that you, when you were a kid or a teenager, you thought you'd be on?
Danny: I wouldn't say so. My dad was a school psychologist in a school district in the Bay Area. He had the same job for over 35 years, and my mom was a pharmacist. She was kind of a dynamic pharmacist, that she did different things with media on occasion. But I didn't have in my immediate circle of my parents' friends, et cetera, any sort of role models that followed a business trajectory. So I didn't really know what that looked like, and I had to navigate a lot of that sort of on my own with relationships that I built.
So I wouldn't say that I ever had a thought where I was like, "This is where I want to be in 15 years, and these are the really rational steps to work backward from that." It's been kind of learning as I go, sometimes falling flat on my face, sometimes being able to get inputs from mentors, but very often kind of trying to figure it out myself, because I wouldn't say that I was someone, unlike a lot of my peers, who had parents who worked in the private sector or who worked in business.
Morra Aarons-Me...: So when we talked in our sort of pre-interview, you talked about how you used to be a, quote, terror as a manager. How, and what was the feedback? Let me just back up and say that I want this show to be very instructive for people who... We're very pro anxiety on this show, and we want people to feel their anxiety as sometimes a leadership strength. But I think that sometimes when you have big feelings and when you feel anxiety and imposter syndrome, you can take it out on other people, right? So this really piqued my interest when you said that, that you used to be a terror as a manager. I'm curious, what did that look like?
Danny: Yeah. And I wouldn't say that I'm completely over that hump yet. I'll be honest. There are some moments where I have a bit of an energy level that I can't necessarily temper. But yeah, I think that's accurate. I think I could call myself a bit of a Tasmanian devil at times. And what are the inputs, and what are the outputs? I mean, the inputs to that are when you operate with a bit of anxiety in a corporate environment, how that spills over is that you're concentrating on certain interactions and really trying to have an outsize impact on those interactions. So, as a result, you might over-prepare, over-engineer, over-analyze.
Some great feedback I received is that not letting great be the enemy of good. We have a saying within Google that I think has now kind of spread throughout technology, sort of the 80-20 of something. What is the 80% effort that might get you where you're going, versus that last 20? And there are different ways to interpret that statement. It's used in different ways. But absolutely, I think that I would let some of my anxiety or some of my sense of urgency spill out.
Morra Aarons-Me...: Would you yell? How would it show?
Danny: No. No, not really.
Morra Aarons-Me...: What are your most common go-tos?
Danny: I think there are a couple things. One is that, at a place like Google, the executive reviews that you go into... Let's say you're working on a new strategy, a new partnership, a new product. The executive reviews are very direct-communication environments. There's a lot of candor, and there's a lot of very direct communication. And I think for the first several years of my time at Google, my approach to preparing my team for those discussions would almost be like me role-playing the scenario that they were about to go into. So I would actually play the part of the executive that they were going to meet, but I would do it in a way that wasn't as conscious as it needed to be. Like, I wouldn't say, "Hey, I'm about to simulate some of the behaviors and some of the questions you'll receive, but it's not personal. I'm in your corner." I wouldn't say those things. I wasn't conscious necessarily that I was doing it. I was just letting that behavior sort of roll down a hill and then assuming that character.
And I did that for years, and I would get negative feedback on it universally, but I was very stubborn about it because I was saying, "No, I'm just trying to prepare you. No, I'm just trying to prepare you." And it was absolutely the wrong approach, and it took me a very long time to let go of that approach and to realize that what I actually should be doing is boosting people's confidence in those smaller discussions and helping improve psychological safety in those discussions. So then when they go into those more challenging reviews, they're prepared, but they're confident. So that was one that I clearly have not done a great job of.
The second one is that I would very often, when we were preparing for certain discussions, be absolutely... be sort of pushing to over-prepare and holding myself and the team to sort of this unrealistic standard. And as a result, people would be sort of looking at me like, "Haven't we reached a point of diminishing returns on this? What new insights are we really gleaning?" And there's a concept of resiliency when it comes to brainstorming and creative thought. So it's really hard to walk the fine line between what is a resilient process or a thorough process between one where you sort of turn into a terror as a manager, and I would continually not get that right.
Morra Aarons-Me...: Why? Because-
Danny: And then the third-
Morra Aarons-Me...: Oh, no, sorry. No, you keep going. Keep going.
Danny: Okay. I would just say the third one that... This is actually something that really helped me by going through the Stanford program and meeting colleagues from other industries, is that as a manager, if you have, let's say, 10 meetings a day or 50 to 75 meetings a week, which for me is pretty typical.
Morra Aarons-Me...: Wow!
Danny: If I have one of those meetings which I show up and I have a hard edge, I'm asking pointed questions, I'm reducing psychological safety based on my approach, that one discussion is the one that people remember. It's the one that goes viral. It's not the 49 other positive conversations or ones where I was creating a supportive environment. And for me, for a long time, the average was probably not 49 out of 50 positive interactions. It was probably more like nine times out of 10. And if you look at it sort of like, wow, Danny, 90% of your interactions were positive and supportive, and I'm like, "Yeah, that's fine," but I would say that the leaders that I've come to really admire and have gotten to know at a deeper level, they're at a hundred out of a hundred. And they hold themselves to a very high standard, not in such a way that it bleeds out as them being like a terror to their teams, but really hold themselves to a high sort of character standard.
So they are remarkably consistent in how they show up, and I was not. I was a little too... Like I said, I was a little too unpredictable, a little too inconsistent. So even if it was 90% of the interactions I was showing up in a productive and supportive way, I would miss that one. And it was hugely detrimental, and I'm only now beginning to become more conscious of how critical those sorts of behaviors are as a manager.
Morra Aarons-Me...: I feel like part of me wants to say, "Give yourself a break." One interaction is... I mean, that's 10%. Is that just your perfectionism speaking?
Danny: Yeah. It's a really reasonable thing to say, but maybe I'll offer a bit of a provocative sort of counterpoint, which is I think that in today's day and age, where we're working from home, where we're dealing with one pandemic uncertainty to the next, where challenges with mental health are the norm, challenges with processing externalities is the norm, I would say that the modern manager has to be remarkably consistent and remarkably predictable. And that may be even more valuable than the image that maybe we previously had of managers as sort of like this creative type who could be a little enigmatic, who could be a little unpredictable, but their brilliance sort of papered over that. I maybe operated with a bit of that as a core value for a long time, and I've really come full circle to realize that that was misguided. So I absolutely hear what you're saying. Yeah, maybe this is just another perfectionist's instinct, but if that's maybe where I'm channeling my anxious energy towards, like having consistent, supportive interactions with my team, I actually think that's probably a good use of my energy.
Morra Aarons-Me...: I love that. It reminds me of the Buddhist concept of right effort or appropriate effort, where you really need to figure out, if the strings are either too tight or too loose, the sound is not going to be beautiful. And so the strings have to be tuned correctly and neither too tight nor too loose, right? So the consistency in the manager is not always about driving your team to produce the best results all the time. It's about showing up for them in a way that they can trust you and come to lean on you.
Danny: Yeah. It's a big one. And the other thing I've thought about sort of related to that, I think it's a really wonderful point and a great analogy, is very often as managers, we have to deliver challenging feedback, or we just have to provide constructive criticism or input. And the way that I've come to think about that is that... And all of those interactions you could put on a continuum of, let's say, one to 10, and 10 being an individual who is absolutely doing the wrongest possible thing in a corporate environment. But the average, let's say, misstep in a corporate environment warrants more like a two or a three reaction from a manager. And that would be more like, "Hey, let me just give you some quick feedback. I observed that this particular message maybe didn't land." And that sounds very supportive, right?
But what I was realizing that I was doing is I was providing the feedback, which is good. You shouldn't under-do feedback, and managers very often under-do feedback, but I was consistently at a four or a five when I should have been at a two or a three. And even being a little bit further on that grade of severity was something that I realized I was also missing pretty frequently. And just being a little more tuned into that, it's hard. And it sounds like, again, I'm holding myself to an impossible standard, but what I realized is that the very best, most consistent managers just really get this right, as I said, 99-plus percent of the time.
Morra Aarons-Me...: And also just lowering the stakes-
Danny: Yeah.
Morra Aarons-Me...: ... for feedback. Where does this come from, the intensity and the high-stakes approach, it sounds like you're describing? Is that something that is from your background, your childhood, your training?
Danny: I think it's a couple of things, and maybe I'll just sort of think out loud a little bit.
Morra Aarons-Me...: Yeah.
Danny: I think one is that, in a corporate environment, you're constantly having to kind of reprove or reinvent yourself to show that you're adding value. You really can't rest on your laurels. You can't assume that what you delivered in the previous cycle is going to carry you forward. And to be able to manage that instinct, manage that urge is a real challenge for me as a leader. And what's the root cause of that? I think it's a handful of things. I think it's wanting to just hold myself to a high standard, wanting to consistently perform, and things like that. So I think that's part of it. I think if I look back at, if I go back further, I referenced a bit of a feeling of imposter syndrome, and I'm not trying to water down that phrase at all, because I absolutely think that there are various severities of that feeling. But for me-
Morra Aarons-Me...: No one owns that feeling, by the way. And the bigger the room that you're in, the more people are going to feel imposter syndrome.
Danny: Yeah. Okay, wonderful. Yeah.
Morra Aarons-Me...: Or the fancier the room, I should say, not spatially bigger.
Danny: Yeah. So I'll very often be in interactions... Yeah, I went to a great college. I went to UC Davis. I'm very proud that I went there. It was not easy to get in. But very often when I'm at a place like Google, I'm in a room with somebody who went to Harvard, someone who went to Stanford, et cetera. And that's just very often the norm of the interactions I'm in. There are, of course, many exceptions to that. But I sometimes will have a feeling like I have to constantly prove myself, and not because people are peering at my resume on LinkedIn, let's say, during the meeting. But when you start out your career and then you get into tech and you begin to observe these formal and informal networks, and a lot of them are based on these prestige-oriented experiences that I just simply didn't have, then I think you sort of develop a bit of a chip on your shoulder as a result. And many very, very successful people have that as a driver for them.
But keeping that in balance is extraordinarily challenging. It's like one of these classic things that what might make me successful is that sense of urgency and that drive to deliver. But at the same time, it's also what has absolutely gotten me into trouble on many, many occasions. And part of my motivation for doing this is actually just wanting to be very open with people I've worked with or other managers who might be struggling with similar things. And you really have to go through a pretty thorough sort of reinvention process, where some people who might be listening to this who know me might be like, "This doesn't even sound like Danny."
But one of the things I've thought a lot about is that to go through this process and this transformation process as a leader, you really have to unlearn almost entirely a lot of these behaviors. And then so people will start to look at you and say things like, "Have you lost your edge? Do you still have the fire in your belly?" But it's just basically a full and non-shortcuttable transformation process to go from being a manager who... a leader who really cannot manage that energy and cannot manage those urges to being someone who can channel them effectively and, to your point earlier, kind of the good energy or being able to channel that effectively.
Morra Aarons-Me...: I want to ask a question that I can imagine so many people listening are just, first of all, just nodding their heads. It's like the ambition and the sense of what drives you to keep proving yourself is what gets you where you need to be, but it can make you such a nightmare to yourself and a lot of people around you. How do you solve for that question? I mean, it sounds like that is the work that you're doing right now, is how do I keep reinventing myself and innovating in this very competitive environment while not acting it out on those around me?
Danny: Yeah. It's a great question. And I think that the general trend of innovative companies towards valuing transparency and valuing candor from leaders will help leaders succeed along this continuum. And increasingly, I've become comfortable just being quite open with these challenges, not unlike somebody who is, let's say, managing a substance addiction, and they become very open that they're recovering. And sort of being able to bring people into that process, I've felt like, has helped me because it also, it has invited other people who I work with, some people on my team, sometimes it's peers to... I want to show them that I'm approachable for this feedback and that they can approach me and say, "Hey, listen, I think you didn't quite get this right."
Or some of the feedback I received recently is that like, "Hey, Danny, I felt like you almost under-did your feedback there. We felt like we didn't land this, and you almost didn't necessarily hold us accountable. Can you explain?" And in that situation, I might say, "Yeah, maybe I should have come in at a four, but I was actually more at a three or a two." So I think bringing people into that process and really leading with transparency, leading with candor, I would say that innovative corporate environments are supportive of that now. It's much, I think, better understood. Yeah, so I think that's a big one.
The other thing I'll say, which I mentioned and I referenced, is you have to become comfortable that people will begin to look at you a little differently, and people may wonder, people you know really well, people you might have worked with very closely, they will wonder, "Is something missing? Do you still have fire in your belly? Are you still scrappy? Are you still willing to roll up your sleeves?" And in my case, the answer is an emphatic yes. But I'm just in the process of learning how to do it in a more productive way that generates substantially more psychological safety for the people around me.
So I think a little bit about... I have an uncle who plays banjo, and he also does woodworking, and he hurt his strumming hand. And what he told me is that he had to completely relearn how to strum on the banjo because he wasn't able to use one of his fingers. And I thought about his journey to learn the banjo as a multi-year journey, but the process then of having to relearn it and to relearn how to play an entirely different way, it actually resonated with me a lot as I think about my leadership journey, which is that it's a complete relearning.
We very often talk about how you need 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. Well, I unquestionably spent 10,000 hours learning a particular way to manage, and now I've probably done about 10% of that or a thousand hours to learn how to be a leader in this new way. So I have a long way to go, but I think that being able to embrace that this is a almost complete transformation and being comfortable that those around you may sort of wonder or question that journey, it's something you're just going to have to become comfortable with.
Morra Aarons-Me...: Do you feel like you're becoming less anxious because of the transformation, or more, or the same?
Danny: No, I absolutely feel like I'm becoming less anxious as a result. Sometimes I almost feel like I have anxiety about not being anxious enough because I find myself sort of being... Like, I'll get out of an interaction, and I'm like, "Wow. I was really laid back." I have this joke. I had a really good friend in college who was my roommate for a while. And he said to me, he said, "Danny, you're many things. You're many things, but laid back is not one of them." And I always think of that, and I tell people that sometimes because I think it's really funny.
But I was going to say that sometimes it freaks me out a little because the manner in which I approached an interaction was so, let's say, warm, supportive, predictable, almost to the point of being boring. But I think that obvious leaders actually can be really successful ones. So it's just a little bit of telling myself and then also inviting others in to sort of provide that positive reinforcement that you can be an effective leader without being enigmatic, unpredictable, and assuming that your brilliance will paper over your behavior. And those things just don't work. So occasionally, I have anxiety about the journey, but I do think my general urge to sort of act this way has diminished greatly.
Morra Aarons-Me...: When you think about this sort of growing interest and a growing sense of empathy, I think, and regard for others' mental health, what was your own experience growing up with mental health and with others' mental health?
Danny: Yeah, it's a great question. Obviously, a personal one. But I had mental health challenges around me my entire life. My mom's brother, a really sweet man, was paranoid schizophrenic. He lived with my grandma, and every Friday night for Shabbat dinner, we'd go to their house. And he lived there, and we would play chess together. We'd interact. We'd listen to music together. But I knew even from a very young age that he was struggling with this diagnosis. As I grew up, my dad, who passed away eight years ago actually this week, struggled with... He was manic-depressive and struggled with bipolar episodes. And he was the most gentle, sweetest person, but was also a bit unpredictable.
So sometimes I think about the quite unconventional male role models that I had in my life, people who were extraordinarily well-meaning and really didn't have a mean bone in their body, but were also not conventionally consistent and certainly didn't occupy the male fatherly stereotype that we have in society of someone who I could sort of almost holistically emulate. I didn't have that kind of role model. But I don't have any ill will towards my mom or my dad. In fact, it's really the opposite. I now am able to kind of understand a little bit more about the nature of that relationship, how it affected me. I think what's interesting, though, about having that sort of challenge so closely in my nuclear family is that I think, for a very long time, I lacked empathy for milder forms of mental health challenges. So for example, if someone's sort of dealing-
Morra Aarons-Me...: Really?
Danny: Yeah. If someone's sort of dealing with a small hardship... Like, for example, let's say that even in the context of a workplace, if someone missed a deal or if they had a lackluster performance review and they would come to me and they'd be upset about it, I think that I didn't have as much empathy because I dealt with sort of more extreme versions of it growing up and sort of in some cases my-
Morra Aarons-Me...: Right. Like, I'll show you a real problem here. Yeah.
Danny: Exactly. It's like my perspective actually didn't help here, because you think that perspective would breed wisdom. It would allow me to sort of consistently operate with empathy, but I think I only had empathy really for the extremes. And I think that in a corporate environment, it wasn't like a totally questionable value, but it was not the right instinct. So it's one of these things that I can kind of explain and understand and rationalize, but in hindsight, it was probably leading to some kind of non-productive behaviors.
Morra Aarons-Me...: What relationship do you think growing up around such an extreme... I mean, a father with bipolar disorder takes a toll. What relationship did it... How did that affect your own ambition and your own anxiety to achieve? I'm curious.
Danny: I really love my dad, and I really did admire him in so many ways. He was very gentle. He was very forgiving. He was extremely loyal to his family. I think, at the same time, knowing that his diagnosis sort of was an impediment to certain opportunities, certain relationships, certainly probably some professional opportunities and things like that, it probably gave me a greater sense of urgency to, let's say, actualize my own potential and to be, in some ways, sort of peerless and not maybe as consistently enough, as I've sort of alluded to, operate with empathy or lead with vulnerability, lead with candor. So it ends up kind of creating a bit of a reverse perspective that I alluded to, both sort of on my own behavior, which is like maybe I should use the fact that I have closer-to-full mental faculties and to lead with empathy and to be more approachable, rather than using those faculties to become some sort of business super-athlete.
And I think that maybe too often, I would orient toward the latter versus the former, and that's possible. I don't think it was the sole and driving motivation, but I think it's somehow mixed up in sort of the crazy cocktail that we all are as human beings. I think if you grow up with any kind of headwind or any sort of challenge... It could be being in an underprivileged home, or it could be certainly being an underrepresented minority, as we've come to understand the challenges of being an underrepresented minority in the workplace. I think that it ends up creating some kind of motivation. And so then for me, if I could see that my dad was, let's say, challenged to sort of realize his own full potential because of some of the challenges he had, then I think, as his son, I would be motivated to use the capabilities I have, sort of the lack of impediments, and realize my full potential.
So the manifestation of that could be very positive, very productive, sort of acting as a positive role model, being very approachable, being a consistent manager, or it could motivate you to try to become sort of like an outsized presence or an outsized success and do it on an almost overly accelerated timeframe because you're putting pressure on yourself to realize your own full potential. So I use this sort of ideal of like this sort of business super-athlete, which is striving to be something, almost like this impossible standard, and then being less mindful along the way of the secondary behaviors that might stem as a result of that.
And this is things I'm still processing myself, but I do think some of these are connected. Like, if I were to give myself from maybe 15 years ago a bit of advice, it would be, "You should realize your potential, and you should process your experience with your family as a motivator, but you should also feel like you can channel that energy a little bit more effectively maybe on a day-in, day-out basis. And I think that's maybe a bit of the advice not only I give to myself but others out there who are kind of thinking about, "What do I do with this energy? What do I do with this ambitious energy? What do I do with this anxious behavior?" and just thinking about the really effective ways to channel that.
Morra Aarons-Me...: Okay. So the last question: What's in your toolkit for keeping up this practice, for growing the empathy, for being consistent? I'd love to hear what you're practicing.
Danny: Yeah, it's a great question. I think as I approach the new year, there are three things I'm thinking about. One is I'm trying to very consciously empower the leaders in my team to step up and to play bigger leadership roles. I'm trying to consciously help them sort of operate out of my shadow. I'm trying to lead more from the back rather than the front. So that's one. And I check in with these leaders on a near daily basis and saying, "How is this going? Did it happen too quickly? Is there more I can do to support you?" And it's almost a daily dialogue with them about the evolution of this. That's number one.
The second is that I'm really trying to consciously unfold or open up sort of how I would approach things. So in treating, let's say, things that might have been an advantage for me in the corporate environment not as some sort of trade secret, but as a best practice. So I'm trying to say, "Hey, here's how I would have approached it, or here's where you can kind of go in with this meeting," and just try to have no concept of Danny's secret sauce. I don't value that at all. I might have valued that a little bit before. But I'm really trying to open that up more.
And the third thing is, and I kind of alluded to this, is I'm trying to write more, be more open, bring more people along on this journey. I am a little uncomfortable about it, but I think it's the right thing to do because I want to just be very open and very open in my journey. And then, my hope is that it does inspire also a couple other people to evaluate their approach and to evaluate how they utilize their energy. But then my hope also is that if it does reach some of the people I work with and they listen to this, they're like, "Yeah, you know what? I have observed this, and I can be involved in Danny's journey. I can involve him in mine." I think that would be really exciting.
Morra Aarons-Me...: I think so, too. And I am grateful that you shared, and I do not see a vulnerability hangover in your future. I think that most people who've certainly gotten to the level you have can relate to a lot of what you've said. So thank you.
Danny: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.