Why Evan Spiegel wants Snap employees to have ‘uncomfortable’ conversations

Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wants team members to have tough conversations.

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Snap CEO Evan Spiegel encouraged employees to have tough conversations to drive the business forward.Spiegel emphasized the importance of addressing key issues and making rigorous prioritizations.Amazon and Netflix also promote open feedback cultures to enhance efficiency and improvement.

Oftentimes productive discussions are some of the most uncomfortable to have, but Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wants workers to push through the awkwardness.

In an interview with The Verge, Spiegel said he encourages team members to have “tough conversations” to move the business forward.

“I think it’s so important to encourage people to raise the most important issues facing our business,” he said. “Sometimes that’s uncomfortable. We’re all human.”

The Snap cofounder said the company operates with leaner teams, it has to make “harder tradeoffs” and “prioritize very rigorously” to achieve the greatest profit.

“And so I think encouraging people to have those prioritization conversations and really work well together is just very important,” Spiegel said.

This isn’t the first time the Snap CEO has talked about the concept.

In an open letter to employees earlier this month, Spiegel also cited Susan Scott’s “Fierce Conversations,” which discusses how to raise tough issues. Scott, founder of Fierce, Inc., a training company whose clients include Yahoo and Coca-Cola, wrote that “the conversation is the relationship,” a belief that Spiegel steers his team with.

“Scott believes that burnout is the result of trying to solve the same problem over and over and provides several tools,” he said in the note to employees.

Spiegel referred to Scott’s framework for presenting issues, which breaks down steps like introducing the problem and why it is significant, describing your ideal outcome, explaining what you’ve done so far in addressing it, and what help you want from the team.

Other Big Tech companies have also put their own spin on feedback culture.

Amazon, for example, just announced Monday that it was implementing a new “bureaucracy mailbox,” where employees can report what CEO Andy Jassy defined as “unnecessary and excessive process or rules.”

The Amazon CEO said that superfluous bureaucratic regulations “should be called out and extinguished” and added that he would read the submitted emails and “action them accordingly.”

Netflix has long urged staff to practice “extraordinary candor” — a willingness to provide and receive constructive feedback up and down the corporate ladder, even if that means admitting to mistakes.

“It takes courage and vulnerability to ask someone how you could do better, or to seek alternative options, and integrity only to say things about a colleague you’re willing to share with them directly,” the company wrote in a memo.

The streaming giant acknowledged that honest critique can be difficult to lay out — especially to more senior colleagues — but wrote that this candor helps both employees and the company to “improve faster.”