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Frank Slootman: “Being a CEO is a highly confrontational role”

May 23, 2025

“I’ve gone one record a few times and people have taken me to task on it, when I’ve said that being a CEO is a highly confrontational role. But they think that ‘confrontational’ means I’m grabbing people by the lapels and slamming them against the wall and yelling. That’s not what I mean by confrontation.”

The former CEO of Snowflake and ServiceNow continues:

“Confrontation is about confronting issues and situations. When you see something that is either not good, not good enough, or can be better, you need to talk to the team and people responsible to bring them along in your thinking.”

In Frank’s view, the framing should be: “this is why I am saying this, what do you think?” The goal of the conversation is to help them see the problems you’re seeing. You should be driving them to a “higher level of aspiration,” he explains.

“I often start the conversation with, ‘How do you think things are going?’ I’m not telling them ‘you suck,’ or ‘things are terrible.’ Let them talk. And then you can say, ‘Well what about this?’ And all of a sudden, the perspective has opened up and changed. So the challenge is bringing them along in your thinking — then it’s not confrontational… Obviously there’s finesse and subtlety. You’re dealing with people. You don’t want to destroy them. You want to build them, not bring them down.”

You need to help them grow:

“People have a tendency to go sideways. They rinse and repeat and keep doing the same things. You can’t in a high-growth company. You need to become a different version of yourself. I’m trying to help them think through that. What does that look like? What does your organization look like a year from now versus what it looks like today?… In other words, stimulate their thinking. Challenge them to think about what they should do differently next week. Is that confrontation? Yes it is, but it’s dressed up in a way that it engages people.”

Frank believes founders should be doing this every single week.