Thread by @evanlapointe

Everyone wants to feel heard. Listening takes time. If you want to move fast as a business, here's the secret:

Build teams worth listening to.

Here's how you do it, and what to avoid...

You will work with four kinds of people:

1. Experts
2. Amateurs
3. Modifiers
4. Anti-modifiers

1. Experts are people who do a task or project well. When there is a job to be done, the expert gets it right, makes few mistakes, and has a high probability of driving great decisions, priorities, and precise action.

An article I wrote about experts:
medium.com/@evanlapointe/…

Experts are worth listening to. They surface details, nuance, and precision that will help us avoid mistakes and maximize return on effort.

When we don't listen to experts, we make avoidable mistakes that decrease performance and/or require more effort than necessary to succeed.

2. Amateurs are people who make a lot of mistakes when doing a task or project because they lack competence, fluency, and familiarity.

They will have a high probability of driving poor decisions, prioritization, and actions will be imprecise.

We can develop Amateurs into Experts through coaching, training, education, enablement. But not every amateur intends on becoming an expert, often due to ego, Dunning Kruger effect, insecurity, or they're sometimes just a jerk.

Amateurs are worth listening to because their misunderstandings of our products, marketing, or services will be shared with the general market. They will reveal the mistakes our customers will also make...mistakes experts very often underestimate.

But that's where it stops...

Amateurs are not to be listened to for strategy, priorities, or precision in action, especially those who are not intent on becoming experts. Use that listening time for coaching if there is time, otherwise exclude amateurs from discussion on strategy, tooling, priorities, etc.

3. Modifiers are like experts, but rather than doing a task or project well, they invent or re-imagine the task or project as something far more impactful, efficient, or elegant. Modifiers CHANGE our business, rather than DO our business, and they are our most valuable people.

Listen to modifiers ALWAYS. They find better ways of doing everything. They understand it's impossible to do all of their plans (sometimes it's just not the right time), but they will never understand why you won't listen.

Not listening to modifiers will destroy your business.

4. Anti-modifiers are the people who block modifiers and progress in your business. They shoot down ideas, keep things inefficient and old, and can't understand why investing in elegant design and process is superior to pragmatic design and process.

Anti-modifiers are the worst.

Anti-modifiers look like experts, but they use their expertise to destroy progress and innovation rather than to create it. They use their fluency, competence, experience, title, etc. to appear credible, and then they shut things down, and do so repeatedly.

With anti-modifiers, you need to get them out of your business IMMEDIATELY. They need leadership roles at your competitors' companies so they can destroy that company instead of yours.

We should try to give them opportunities to change, but anti-modifiers often struggle to grow.

If you have teams full of experts, modifiers, and amateurs you are nurturing into future experts, you have a team worth listening to.

If your team has a higher proportion of amateurs and any anti-modifiers, you have a team not worth listening to.

Build teams worth listening to and then make sure everyone feels heard and is heard. When you do that in product, marketing, sales, customer success, analytics, development and more, you will be unstoppable.

Obvious? Yes.

Seen often? No.