Been thinking a lot this week about how much being “real” matters, and how easy it is to lose sight of when you're building something with a lot of moving parts.
People respect transparency more than almost anything else. More than titles, more than image, more than whatever version of yourself you think you're supposed to put on. They appreciate access, and they appreciate being able to be honest with you and have you be honest back. When someone knows they can come to you with anything and get a straight conversation in return, that's a different kind of trust, and it's hard to build any other way.
The hard part is doing it consistently when there's so much coming at you. When you're running anything at scale, you've got a constant stream of requests, asks, opinions, and expectations coming from every direction. Not a complaint, it comes with the territory…but it can pull you in ten directions at once. And if you're not careful, you start playing a role instead of being yourself. You start saying what people want to hear instead of what you actually think. You start managing an image instead of the relationship.
People don't want a filtered version of you, they want to know how you actually think. They want to know where you stand, even when it's uncomfortable…especially then. Being real isn't always being soft. Sometimes it's being direct in a way that's hard to hear, but people respect it because they know it's honest.
In the good moments and the bad ones, when things are flying and when things are crashing, the version of you that shows up is the version people end up trusting. That's the one people end up rocking with for the long haul.
You're going to make mistakes. I make them all the time. With that many voices pulling at you and that much weight on every decision, you're not going to get it all right. But people forgive mistakes a lot faster when they know you're being real with them. What they don't forgive is feeling like they got an act instead of a person.
Be the same person in every room. The same person when it's going great and when it's falling apart. Let people in. That's the version people stay with. The relationships you build will be the kind that last, the ones that hold up when things get hard, the ones worth building a life and a company around.