Handling demanding leaders
Remain calm and stick firm to your points
Welcome to this week’s free article of Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. If you’d like to become a paid member, see the benefits here, and feel free to use this expense template to ask your manager.
Amazon is famous (infamous?) for having some pushy, demanding leaders.
You can handle pushy leaders with my simple approach: Be personally easy to get along with while professionally firm when needed.
No matter where you work, there will be difficult people.
Some will "come at you" with challenges or demands.
One leadership style is to make an assertion and see if anyone challenges it.
By saying "I think you should do X" I find out if you have a better idea and if not, you do what I think anyway.
Pretty win/win from a pushy perspective.
In one example at Amazon, Jeff Wilke, the CEO of Amazon retail, was upset at a recent launch failure by my team. His justifiable frustration led him to question and doubt every part of our product.
I eventually simply leveled with him and said:
"Look, we screwed up the implementation of a button on a web page. Absolutely a terrible mistake and if you want to punish us for it, I understand. But, the technology *behind* the button works just fine. Don't throw out the working technology because we messed up a button."
Here I was not fighting, I was accepting responsibility for the problems and for any consequences. But I was firmly making the case for the underlying technology.
Jeff paused and reflected.
Then he said: "That's a pretty good argument."
Not only did he support the core technology, but he became less upset about the problems because we were not denying them.
What you can do:
Remain calm if at all possible! Emotion triggers more emotion in return, and spirals.
Even if criticized, try to take it in stride in the moment.
If you need to, ask for a break and come back later.
Stick firm to your points.
Calmly state your case
What works here is the contrast.
When you disagree with someone in words while being truly agreeable in demeanor, many people will match your conduct. They will discuss with you rather than attack you.
In a business room, most people do not want to be seen as ranting jerks (even if they are pushy by nature). If they lash out at someone who is calmly stating reasonable points in an even voice, they look like they have lost control.
"Strong" leader types never want to appear out of control.
Thus, if you are calm, they usually have to remain calm with you.
This process is not easy!
It takes a lot of practice
Whenever possible, talk yourself through your response to emotional prodding before the meeting.
An excellent trick is to decide in advance: "If this escalates, I will become more quiet, calm, and firm in response."
By deciding your response in advance, you can avoid escalation.
I definitely failed sometimes and got into unproductive debates.
Sometimes I know I was the "pushy, demanding" leader, particularly early in my career.
To those I pushed unreasonably, a sincere apology. I do not regret trying to get a lot done; I do regret my immature approach.
How to Break Through to Executive
If you want to learn what makes a great executive, how executives are selected, and how to manage your promotion process, then enroll in my live online class that takes place September 7-8 (on the weekend so that busy leaders can make it).
I’ve promoted 8 reports from Senior Manager (Amazon L7) to Director (Amazon L8), contributed to 25+ Director promotions, hired 10+ Directors internally and externally, drove the promotion of 3 engineers to Principal, and of my former reports 2 are current Amazon VPs (L10) and 5 are C-Suite outside of Amazon.
650+ students have taken this course and rated it 4.7/5.
You get 13.5 hours of total content (7.5 hours of on-demand video recording lectures for self-learning; 4 hours of live online Q&A with me; and 2 hours of live online peer networking).
We already have enrolled folks from Amazon, Netflix, Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Coupang, Salesforce, Doordash, LinkedIn, Walmart, Coinbase, JPMorgan Chase & Co., and more.
Note: If you’re already in executive roles (e.g. Director, Sr. Director, VP) and want to optimize performance or move up further, consider my other live online class, Cracking the C-suite 'How to Get and Master Key Executive Roles' which I co-teach with Sue Bethanis (CEO/Founder of Mariposa Leadership) who has coached 400+ tech executives.
Next cohort is October 5-6.
Sue was my best executive coach when I was an Amazon VP.
Career Talks: How Being Unreasonable Drove Me to Amazon VP - Make Your Mark
We have released three new Career Talks classes. While these on-demand classes are available for purchase individually, they are all free to paid newsletter subscribers (read here for paid subscriber benefits).
Current Career Talks:
How to Get Your Ideas Heard
Executive 1:1s Using Them Well
How Being Unreasonable Drove Me to Amazon VP - Make Your Mark
View the Career Talks class catalog.
Existing paid subscribers, to get the coupon code, go to the Level Up Newsletter site and click "Paid Member Content" at the top bar. You will see the coupon code in that member-only article.
I share this because the 73 minute Career Talk on “Being Unreasonable” is particularly relevant to this article. I discussed why to be unreasonable, the difference between unreasonable and irrational, persisting through failures, and answered thoughtful audience questions.
Connect With Ethan & Jason
Ethan’s live online courses and on-demand courses.
Level Up is your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans.