YouSaid · the spoken record

Wes Kao

lines on the record: 93
first: 2025-04-06
most recent: 2025-04-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Make your own decision, like take all this into account, you know, but you don't have to diminish to that degree. And so, again, speaking accurately, like if you have really strong reasons to recommend something to, you know, to a cross-functional team, it's almost irresponsible to act like you are not really sure and it's just this like random idea, hey, try it if you want to, try, you know, like we might lose a lot of money and time if we don't take this idea, right? So again, speaking accurately is so, so important.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The rest of your team is listening to you at face value. And y'all might spend real headcount and dollars pursuing something that you have advocated for in a way where you kind of overreached with your level of confidence. So that's for people who are overconfident. It's equally a problem if you're underconfident. So I have some clients who their CEO asks them to share some recommendations with another team because they've run something before. And so they share all this amazing information. And at the end, they're like, oh, but you can ignore everything I just said. You know, obviously make your own decision, do what you think is best. And like, if you want to just ignore everything, that's totally cool too. You know, and it's like, you just didn't have to say that, you know, you could say.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find that people tend to naturally be on the spectrum a little bit too confident as a baseline or not confident enough. So people who are too confident might state hypotheses as if they are fact. So that really bothers me. That's another one of my pet peeves, where, you know, if you say, this is X or this will X, that is different than saying this could X or this might X or this will increase the likelihood of X. So I'm a big proponent of speaking accurately. You can avoid a lot of problems if you speak accurately about your level of conviction and about the actual amount of evidence that you have for something. It's okay for something to be an initial hunch. Say it's an initial hunch. Don't act like this is something that you are super sure about. You've proven out that this is absolutely this way because”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, thank you. I will also say that as someone who tries to walk the talk, I feel like I get a pretty good response rate pretty quickly for the things that I ask for, for the recommendations I'm making. It's not instant. It's not 100%, but over time I've realized that improving my communication has led to people receiving my ideas better, you know, ideas that used to be locked in my head that I would get frustrated that no one else understood. People were now understanding. And that feels really good. That's very, very exciting. And it made me want to do it more, you know, and pay more attention to that. So that kind of going back to what I said earlier about watching for what's working, you know, there's momentum is really encouraging.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like thinking about it as a little bit more upfront investment. And it is an investment. It's not just time. It's an investment because, yes, it takes a little bit longer to make a Slack message a little bit better. But net net, if you save a bunch of questions and back and forth and people asking you things that you don't think they should be asking, then by investing a little bit upfront effort, you've prevented all that from happening. So yeah, it is a little bit more time in the moment, but reaps a lot of benefits down the line.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not going to spend more time on that, but you realize that there's actually more juice left to squeeze there. And you decide to squeeze that juice. Well, now you have extra juice, right? That the other person doesn't have. So, yeah, in my experience, I find that people claim the point of diminishing returns way too early. And this isn't just for communication. This is for strategies, tactics, et cetera. Like they'll try something once, you know, a mediocre attempt and be like, this channel doesn't work. This tactic doesn't work. You know, it's like, really? Because it's working for a lot of other people who are getting really creative with it. You know, I'm not saying that everything has to work for you, but like for you to claim this thing just done a little bit intellectually dishonest. It's more likely that your skill level, your creativity, your execution ability was not good enough. And that's fine. Like, let's admit that to ourselves because if we admit that, then we can do”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one instance of something is ever going to feel important enough to spend a little bit more time on that. But when you zoom out, that's like, well, that's all your work then. This is like literally everything you've touched. This is all your workout then because any piece of that process you thought wasn't worth spending time on. And now this is just the quality of your work and it's not as good as it could be. Yes, like these might seem minor, but A, it compounds. And also B, all the quote unquote big things, everyone else is already doing. So there's not a lot of alpha in that. Whereas if you are paying attention to skills that people think are boring or too basic and realizing that there is, that's a lever that you can pull, that, you know, someone else thought, oh, we're hitting diminishing returns on that. I'm not going to.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, all these little things compound and make a big difference. I often hear people think, well, you know, this individual instance, this individual email, the Slack message is not worth spending a couple more minutes on. It's just an email or it's just a Slack message. The problem with that line of thinking is that”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way to build a habit is usually not changing so many different things at once. It's picking one thing that you want to try and keeping that top of mind, trying it in a bunch of different settings in different ways. And then getting better at that thing before moving on to the next thing. So that's like a really common thing I see in my course is people feeling overwhelmed. And I always remind folks that you're building a new habit here and, you know, be patient with yourself, take it step by step.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't think that there's any single shortcut on how to get better besides that. I do think that Being fascinated by a topic and being excited about it makes it more likely that you're going to find it fun to try all these different things and try different ways to get through to people. So I would approach it with a hypothesis driven experimental mindset and almost like a game. Like when I do this, how does that other person react? You know, if I frame it this way, do I get a different reaction? When I try this, am I able to, you know, cut through the noise more? So yeah, so I really think it's about practicing. And I will say that the way not to do it is to try to incorporate 30 different tactics at the same time and then beat yourself up when you don't remember to do them. You know, it's really easy when you are learning a new field or function to get overwhelmed when you're learning a new skill.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How does that speed up? If you would have had seven different touch points of back and forth, does that shrink to two to three? Not every point of friction is going to be avoidable, but a lot of it is if you get better at communicating. So I like watching for the reaction and how quickly and how enthusiastically I'm able to get that reaction. And for the things that are working, do more of that. For things that are not working, adjust your execution because it might not be that the tactic doesn't work. It might be your execution of it wasn't great. And keep trying, basically.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So I have a pretty first principles driven approach for this, which is to think about how long does it take me right now to get to the reaction I'm looking for from my recipient. If it takes a bunch of back and forth and a bunch of friction, Then that's kind of my baseline. Once you start practicing some of these communication skills.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Aren't so I see people basically think, oh, I want to make this easier to read, more skimmable. I'm just gonna throw a bunch of formatting and bullets and, you know, turn everything into bullets. And it's not quite that easy of a solution.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it feels faster and more concise to put bullets and fragments, but a lot of times you're a reader on the other end of that is needing to decipher and interpret and guess what you actually meant. So net net takes longer. And I also think that it can be a little bit of a crutch. It can be a little bit lazy because you are telling yourself that you're being concise when really if you had to turn your sentence fragment into a full sentence, a lot of times it actually is harder than you think because you realize that you actually didn't really know exactly what you meant. So as you're trying to turn it into a full sentence, you're actually needing to use brain power. So that's like, I think a great litmus test of like, was that idea fully thought out? Because if it was, you should be able to really quickly turn it into a complete sentence. And many times you actually.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really hate excessive formatting. So, you know, I've seen memos where 30% of the note was bolded. And that just Negates the entire point of folding because if everything is folded, then nothing is being highlighted, right? So I think using formatting in general more sparingly than you think you have to is probably a good rule of thumb. I also dislike when people overuse bullets and sentence fragments, phrases in bullets when they should use complete sentences that actually show the connected tissue between ideas that show the”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you can use signposting in writing and verbally too. So if you're doing a product demo, you might say something like the most important part to pay attention to is blank or the part that we were most surprised by is blank or the part that customers are, et cetera, right? So you're signaling that whatever comes after this thing is something that you may want to pay attention to. So it's a great way not only to add structure, but to also grab people's attention back if it has strayed sometime as they were either listening to you or reading.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You kick off sentences with signposting words. You can often signal here's where I'm about to talk about in this paragraph.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Signposting is using certain words, phrases, formatting, and an overall structure in your writing that helps guide your reader and signals what is coming in the rest of the post. So this is especially helpful if you have a long memo. It adds structure to where we're going and what certain sections of paragraphs are about. So some of my favorite signposting words are, for example, shows that you're about to show an example because shows that you're about to share your logic and rationale behind something as a next step is a great one. People's eyes kind of automatically zoom to as a next step. Even first, second, third, kicking off a paragraph with that. You're not needing to rely on rich text formatting with bolding, italics, underlines, and all that craziness.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That people love Going back to something that you were saying earlier with Rereading what you wrote. I think the blast radius of a poorly written memo is way bigger than most people think. So if you're just shooting off a message in a Slack channel with 15 other people and it's confusing and you didn't include information you should have included, there's going to be a bunch of back and forth. Like all 15 of these people are reading this being like, okay, what do I do with this? Whereas if you had just taken another look at it, those 15 people would be off to the races. Like they would have read your message and then known exactly what to do next or what their part was or what you were looking for from them. So I think about that a lot too. It's not just me writing this and sending it off. It's all the people who are going to come in contact with this message, who are going to refer to it and use it. And if I just take 30 more seconds to make sure that it's clean, how much can I unblock from their work?”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I feel like it might be called On Running Well, but they're also, I could see there being multiple books called On Writing Well.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, yes, definitely. I was assuming before doing that, but you're right. Some people may not be. And yes, definitely reading your own message first is huge. And yeah, I find that even doing that, you can often spot a lot of low-hanging fruit.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the main tactic is to remind yourself, to be concise. And usually, when I do that, I end up trimming 20% at least of what I wrote, tightening up some sentences. I also ask myself, How might I be adding cognitive load to whatever it is that I'm saying? So, you know, is there a tighter, clearer, cleaner way that I can ask what I'm asking or present the information I'm presenting or make the recommendation that I'm making? And usually, if you even ask yourself that, your brain automatically comes up with stuff. You just see whatever you wrote differently, and you're like, oh shit, I should trim this entire paragraph because like that's secondary, you know, and maybe you have your primary message in Slack and then within the thread add, you know, some of the secondary stuff, right? So I find that most of us, it's reminding yourself to be concise. And once you think of it, your brain naturally will see places where you can trim.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and what might I want to share in the meeting too? Know, especially for more introverted folks, sometimes you need to decide beforehand that you want to speak and you want to make sure you get a certain point across. So even deciding that beforehand makes a huge difference.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not a very glamorous solution by any means, but the clearer I am going into a meeting, going into a conversation, going into a pitch, the better I am at being concise and being able to bring the conversation back to the most important points at being able to stay flexible, but also firm. Yeah, and preparation, I don't mean spending hours and hours preparing for a weekly meeting. Even a couple minutes really makes a huge difference. Most of us are so back-to-back in meetings that we're doing zero preparation. It's like the meeting has started 30 seconds in and you're still unwinding from the last Zoom call that you were on, right? So most of us are in that mental state. So if you even take 30 seconds to one minute to ground yourself on why am I in this meeting, what do I want to share and make sure I get across in the time that we have, you're going to go in there so much more focused and so much more able to be concise.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As we are in a quick turnaround time, telling someone else about it, telling our team about it. And so you are basically asking your brain to do a lot of different processes, especially in a real-time conversation. You're listening to the other person, absorbing, making sense of it, processing it, figuring out what you think and how you would react, and then trying to say something cohesive that makes sense, right? And then trying to be concise about it. So it's just a lot of different processes. And so the only solution I found consistently to being concise is preparation.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Assume that you actually know what your core point is. So you can't cut to the chase unless you know what the chase is. You know, you can't unbury the lead unless you know what the lead is. And so that I found is the bottleneck to being concise. It's actually not really being clear of what you were thinking. That's what's leading to being long-winded. And you can kind of test the theory because most of us have a go-to story that we've told a bunch of times, right? We're like, you know exactly when people are going to laugh, you know, when they're going to gasp or hold their breath, right? And why are you so good at telling that story? And why are you so concise about it? Because you've told it a bunch of times. You know all of the beats. So in meetings, though, at work, we are very rarely talking about the same thing that many times. It's always something new. It's something that we are also probably likely processing ourselves and are in the midst of processing.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, one of my pet peeves is when people are too concise and they equate being concise with brief, being brief. And being concise is not about absolute word count. It's about economy of words, it's about the density of the insight that you're sharing. And so you can have a 300 word memo that's meandering and long-winded and a thousand word memo that is tight and concise. And so not equating concision with briefness I think is a really big one to understand. The second thing is a lot of advice about being concise I think Mrs. an important point. So, you know, we've all heard don't bury the lead, cut to the chase, main point, you know, put the main point at the top, bottom line, not front, right? And all of these pithy aphorisms”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I call it the yes, yes, yes, next, next, next mindset, where I'm, you know, if I'm listening to direct reports present something to me, very often I find myself thinking, got it, all right, yes, let's keep going, right? And, you know, on the other side of that, I've often presented to executives where I had a 15 slide deck. And execs would do that. And I'd be like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, I have a whole sequence. I have a whole order. And sometimes they would give me buy-in or make the decision buy slide four, you know, and I'd be like, okay, well, you know, slide 13, I want to show you this great graph I put together, right? And, you know, what was really helpful for me was realizing that I should take the win, okay? If Zach has already agreed, take the win and keep it moving, move on.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like, that was like 15 seconds, right? Like super fast. And then now we were on the same page about why we're here. And you can listen more intently knowing that I'm looking for a certain kind of feedback.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think explaining why we're doing this, why this benefits the business, what problem is it solving? Again, you can do a lot of this in a couple sentences. And then I also asking or stating what I need from the other person up front. So saying, you know, hey, where's your today because two weeks ago we were reviewing the product flow and realized that there were a couple parts that were kind of confusing. So I took a stab at fixing those areas, rewriting the microcopy, and I want to present them to you today, see if you agree with these changes, and then we're going to roll them out. What I'm looking for from you is feedback on the changes. And if you agree.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And basically reminding people why are we doing this? Why are we here today? Why does this matter? And then getting into the meat”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I actually think that you should always do a little bit of selling, even for situations where people have generally bought in because most of us have a lot going on and we're not actively thinking about whatever you're talking about. So even though I agreed to something two weeks ago, by the time you're telling me about it again, like I thought about a billion other things since then, right? So reminding me of why are we talking about this? Why does this matter and then getting into it and framing that conversation up front is way more likely for us to not get stuck in a cold start and not kind of go two steps back one step forward? The other thing is you can frame a conversation and sell a bit at the beginning very concisely. So I'm not talking about spending 15 minutes out of a 30 minute meeting selling. I'm talking about one to two minutes, even a couple sentences, and then transitioning into the main thing you want to talk about. So I'm a huge proponent of doing.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start by selling Volks, selling the other executives on why are we doing this? Well, we're doing this because this is a chance to shine a light on your team members who are doing amazing work for them to feel motivated and to feel like the rest of the company really sees them and understands what they're doing. And this is all something that is going to motivate your team, right? So sharing why this is helpful and useful and how this is in service of you and your team versus like, oh, this is a favor that you're doing for me to fill out this form and fill it out this way and by this day, et cetera, et cetera.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one of my clients is a head of operations, and she was trying to get the rest of her executive team, which she was a part of, to fill in some wins for the week so that they could share this out with the whole company. And this was going to be motivating. It was going to be shine the light on folks. And she led with the logistics of which document to send to put the details in, what time to put it in by the format that you should put these wins, and didn't really get much of a response from the leadership team, which makes sense, right? Because this totally sounds like one of those things that's another item to check off on your list when you already have so many other things to do. And here's this other process that like we're all supposed to do now, like, yay, right? And so she wasn't really getting response. And that's because she dove straight into logistics. Whereas what she could have done is”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get a slow response or just no response, right? We've all put a Slack message in a channel and got crickets and tumbleweed. So really starting off with selling the person and making sure that they know why we're doing this, why this matters to the company, why now, and then sharing logistics tends to be a lot more effective.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so a common mistake that I see is overestimating the amount of buy-in that you have from your audience. So that looks like jumping straight into talking about the logistics, the details of the how to do something, of the process, when in reality your audience has not yet decided if they even want to do the thing. So what I see operators do in response then is go even deeper into the logistics and the how, thinking that, oh, if I just explain this more than that person will want to do it, when really a sales note is different than a logistics note. A sales note is meant to get people excited to do the thing you want them to do and to agree to do it. And only then after they have bought in does it make sense to share the logistics. So there's an order of operations here. If you switch the order of operations, you will likely”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say broadly the two mediums are verbal communication and written. So verbal being meetings, conversations, presentations, and written being emails, strategy docs, notion docs, Slack messages, text messages, those two categories broadly. And I also think about communication as more of a means to an end, which might be interesting for some people because I teach a course on communication. So you would think that's like, you know, the end in and of itself, but I really see it as a means to an end where the end is getting the ideal outcome you're looking for. So whether that is buy-in or making a good decision as a team or, you know, moving to the next step, whatever that might be, communication is really in service of that end goal.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think another big one that I teach in my course and really kick off with is practicing like it's game day, playing like it's game day. So I see a lot of operators who save their best behavior for executives only. So they want to shine when they're presenting to senior leadership, but with everyone else, they're kind of calling it it. And I just don't think that you're going to be able to get enough reps to actually get good at executive communication if you are only doing it with executives. Because many of us only present to execs once a month, right? Or a couple times a quarter. And that's just not a lot of chances to practice. So really treating every single stakeholder as if they are important because they are and you shouldn't be, you know, if you don't want to waste your CEO's time, you also shouldn't waste your cross-functional team members' time or your manager's time or your director board's time. So that's something else that I ask folks to keep in mind.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say so. You can't solve everything with improving your communication. But you can increase the likelihood of getting what you want”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I often see operators who explain things poorly and then are shocked and horrified when people are confused or there's skepticism, there's apathy, there's a lot of avoidable questions. And I'm a big proponent of asking myself, if I'm not getting the reaction that I'm looking for, how might I be contributing to that? So, you know, instead of blaming other people for not understanding me, I think about how can I explain this more clearly? How can I be more compelling? How can I anticipate any questions that they might have? So I'm a big problem of agency and realizing that we can only And so, the best place to start if you're not getting the reaction you're looking for is reflecting on how I can get better at the skill of communicating. And it absolutely is a skill.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mu stands for most obvious objection. A lot of times, we're surprised by the questions that we get, especially in meetings. We feel blindsided, when really, if you thought for even two minutes about what are obvious objections that I am likely to get, you often immediately come up with what some of those things are. Are you going to be able to anticipate every single objection? No. But can you anticipate the obvious ones? Absolutely.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the blast radius of a poorly written memo is way bigger than most people think. If you're just shooting off a message in a Slack channel with 15 other people and it's confusing, you didn't include information you should have included, there's going to be a bunch of back and forth. Whereas if you had just take another look at it, those 15 people would be off to the races.”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I often see operators who explain things poorly and then are shocked and horrified when people are operated or their skepticism, there's apathy. I'm a big proponent of asking myself if I'm not getting the reaction that I'm looking for, how might I be contributing? How can I explain this more clearly? How can I be more compelling? How can I anticipate any questions that they might have?”
2025-04-06 · Lenny's Podcast · Become a better communicator: Specific frameworks to improve your clarity, influence, and impact | Wes Kao (coach, entrepreneur, advisor) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source