Carole Robin
Carole Robin spent over 20 years teaching the Stanford Graduate School of Business course Interpersonal Dynamics, affectionately known as “Touchy Feely.” After leaving Stanford, she founded a nonprofit called Leaders in Tech, which applies the Touchy Feely principles to help Silicon Valley executives build their leadership and interpersonal skills. Carole co-authored the popular book Connect: Building Exceptional Relationships with Family, Friends, and Colleagues, which shares key insights from her decades of teaching these courses.
Hiring & Teams Skills
The quality of interpersonal relationships is the fundamental driver of organizational effectiveness.
"Interpersonal competence is a determinant of both personal and professional success... people do business with people not ideas, not products, not machines."
Appropriate vulnerability builds trust and humanizes leaders, making teams more likely to rally behind them.
"A leader who is willing to be appropriately vulnerable is a stronger leader... it makes you not less influential as a leader."
Leadership Skills
Effective feedback requires distinguishing between actual emotions and attributions or labels disguised as feelings.
"I feel that you don't care and I feel you're being insensitive are not feelings, and that's where we make our biggest mistakes when it comes to feedback."
In any interaction, you only know your own intent and the other person's behavior; you do not know their internal reality or intent.
"Stay on your side of the net... stick with the two realities you know because we get in trouble the minute we start thinking we know the other person's reality."
A structured feedback loop helps prevent defensiveness by focusing on objective behavior and personal impact.
"The formula is when you do insert behavior, I feel pull out the vocabulary of feelings and I'm telling you this because, or I'm hoping the outcome of you knowing this is."
Small interpersonal irritations ('pinches') should be addressed immediately to prevent them from escalating into major conflicts ('crunches').
"Address it while it's still small and then it won't get big. That's why we call it talk about a pinch before it becomes a crunch."
Repairing a conversation often requires checking for misaligned perceptions of what was actually communicated.
"What did you hear me say? One of the most powerful things you can do when somebody responds in a way that feels very unexpected and out of whack with what you just said is go back to, 'What did you he..."
Effective delegation involves letting go of the need to be the primary problem-solver.
"Leaders often believe... that they have to have all the answers... I believe a leader's job is to ensure the best answer is found. It doesn't matter whether it comes from me or anywhere else in the or..."
True leadership is measured by the organization's ability to function effectively in the leader's absence.
"The worst thing a leader can do is make an organization too dependent on them. If you care about building a sustainable long-term organization and a legacy, then it behooves you not to make the organi..."
Reframing failure as a learning opportunity is essential for long-term growth and resilience.
"The acronym is A-F-O-G, another F-ing... Another Fucking Opportunity for Growth. Every student who ever took a class from me... knows that acronym because my question, when something has gone wrong or..."