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Criticizing in public vs private
Apr. 13th, 2026 06:21 pmFinally - an explicit and clear confirmation that public criticism - helps businesses (and other organizations) to be successful:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCd9ykretlg&t=4357s
1:12:37 [Lenny] Okay, one last hot take that I want to make sure we share is this idea of criticizing in public versus in private. Talk about that.
1:12:44 [Keith Rabois] Yeah, so this is um a lesson I actually absorbed from one of the great founders I work with. And you know, you like many great founders, they have their own management philosophy. And one of the most important tenants is "criticize people in public".
And when you decompose the logic of it, it's so obviously true, but almost no one does this and very few people talk about it even if they do it.
So if you think about it, when you give people feedback negative uh in individually, you're optimizing for the atomic unit, not the system.
The reason why to do it in public is it's more important for all the colleagues to understand that there's an issue. It's being addressed - versus like they they usually have uh suspicions, let's say, or concerns. And if you've channeled the negative feedback to the individual, they don't know that you're addressing this, that you're on top of, you're aware you're addressing it. Now, it's a collaborative. Um, and then also it lets other people kind of raise their hand and say, you know what, I can kind of help with that or you know, etc. And so it becomes like a team building exercise in some way versus like, oh, you have this deficiency, go fix it yourself. And then the rest of the company, you know, is nervous about why this problem is persisting.
1:14:02 [Lenny] When people hear this, they may it may feel like, oh, wait, I'm just it's like it feels aggressive to be criticize everyone public.
Any advice for just like how do you not make it this like I don't know - scary environment - or is that part of it?
1:14:14 [Keith Rabois] Well, I think you want to win, you know, and there's, probably, an art to this. Like I would say, you know, some of the best coaches in sports probably do a bit of both. Um like there's things they will say in front of the team and then there's things that, probably, you know, channel to the individual player. So probably a mix, you know, could be very effective, too.
1:14:33 [Lenny] It feels like you're not focus on psychological safety as a core tenant.
1:14:39 [Keith Rabois] No, I don't believe in that at all. Like high performance machines don't have psychological safety. They're about winning. Like for those who want to, you know, a good book that's off central casting for you is, uh - read "Jordan Rules" or watch "The Last Dance" if you like. But like, fundamentally, read "Jordan Rules".
If you want to be Michael Jordan, you got to act like Michael Jordan.
1:15:00 [Lenny] Do you feel like that's negatively correlated with this idea of psychological safety with success?
1:15:03 [Keith Rabois] For the most part.
