As the founder of the leadership consultancy Practical Works (and former VP of Design at Buzzfeed, to boot), Cap shares what he wishes he would’ve learned earlier about our reliance on instincts instead of tools as a leader, and how being “people first” can actually be a pitfall. Every few weeks as part of The Heartbeat, I ask one question to a founder, CEO, or business owner I respect about their biggest leadership lesson learned. This week, I interview Cap Watkins is the founder of Practical Works. Claire: Hi everyone. I’m Claire Lew and I’m the CEO of Know Your Team. I am psyched today to have a very special guest. I have Cap Watkins who is the founder of a leadership and organizational consulting firm called Practical Works, but you might best know Cap for being the former VP of design at Buzzfeed and being a design leader at Etsy. And I know I’m a big fan of Cap’s writing and his work. We recently were on I think like a design leadership late night show on Youtube, which was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was my first time doing something like that, but an absolute blast and so thrilled to ask Cap this one question about leadership, both having been a leader and then also getting to give advice to a lot of leaders. So Cap, thanks for joining me today. Cap: No, totally. Thanks for asking me to come on. Claire: You bet. Okay. So here’s the question I’ve got for you that I’ve been asking leaders who I admire, which is what one thing you wish you would have learned earlier, as a leader? Cap: Just one thing? Claire: Yeah. Asterix! Cap: Well you got to talk about this a little bit, I think I have two answers to this. I’ve one that’s what I wish I’d learned. And then something I think I’ve seen a lot of people that I talked to kind of learning as we’re talking. I think the thing for me personally was, I wish I had learned sooner how to balance out the needs of the business with the needs of the people I was managing. I think I went into management from the perspective of I’ve had some bad managers in the past. I’ve been treated badly. And I wanted to really understand why it was so hard to be a good manager. Why it was hard to support people that you manage. Why it was hard to tell them what was going on for real, and that kind of thing. And then I became a manager and realized that you can do whatever you want basically, and be whoever you want to be. And so I approached it though from doing the opposite of what my old managers had done. And so I think that meant was … a lot of them were probably going at it purely from a business perspective and that’s why I had such a bad time. But that meant that by doing the opposite, I was coming at it purely from an empathetic perspective, which led me into situations I think where I might’ve been defending my team, or the people on my team, even in situations where maybe they were wrong or maybe what I should’ve been doing was helping them understand more why something was happening. Or why we needed to take things in a certain direction. But then I would refuse to d