Every leader has that one decision, the one that changes everything.

But what happens when that one call costs your company millions?

I started at Amazon literally my first week.

I'm leading a huge building, 6,000 people, and there's an ice storm coming in.

I shut down this building for two days.

The ice storm did not hit us.

It was rain and it cost millions of dollars to Amazon.

That was Rob Hahn, now the chief operating officer over at Pattern, which recently completed a multi billion dollar IPO and helps global brands win online.

That mistake completely reshaped how he leads under pressure.

It's a very frequent thing I say to my teams that has been for the last over a decade since this happened was that there's tons of numbers between 0 and 100 with the ability to not back myself into a corner.

How do we get as close to the right number as possible?

And that shift from quick decisions to intentional impact defines Rob's entire approach to leadership today.

Because now when he leads thousands across the globe, he's driven by one rule every leader should remember.

We don't build interesting things.

We build impactful things.

Especially in the technology space.

With all the hype on AI, we want to impact a consumer process, the bottom line.

And in this episode of Lead the Team, you'll learn how to lead when the stakes are sky high.

How to turn failure into clarity, build trust under pressure, and create teams that focus less on what's shiny and more on what matters.

Welcome back to Lead the Team.

I'm your host, Ben Fanning.

In this conversation that you're going to hear is meant to challenge, inspire and ripple out.

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Enjoy.

Was there one specific painful moment?

And I think everyone has a painful moment where like, you're like, I'm glad I had that experience, but I never want to go back and relive it.

I was fortunate.

Like I said, early in my career, a lot of people took bets at me.

So I became, I was like the youngest, like level eight at Amazon.

So it was like executive level role.

I'm leading a huge building.

I moved to Baltimore.

How old were you at that time?

26.

It's literally my first week and there's an ice storm coming in to Baltimore and so I like, everyone's freaking out about this and they're like, I think we need to shut down the building.

And the interesting thing about this building is they had the highest percentage of people that bust in that because it was the most urban of any of our fulfillment centers at Amazon at the time.

And so they were like, the bus system's probably going to shut down.

And so, like, there's this ice storm.

And so I'm in my first week in this new role, eyes all on me.

I'm sitting here like, I have to make this decision to shut down now.

This is no small task.

Communicating it, figuring it out, like, doing this is obviously a really big deal and a really big role.

And my first thing I did, I shut down this building for two days.

I pre shut it down.

And so I sent, you know, 6,000 people or whatever number it was, didn't come to work.

And it cost like millions of dollars to Amazon.

Millions and millions of dollars.

Cancel customer orders.

Like, just like the worst thing that you can possibly do.

But it's like, hey, it's for the safety of my associates.

It's the number one thing my job is the safety of my team.

Yes.

In that center, the ice storm did not hit us.

It was rain.

And so I literally lost, like the company millions of dollars because I made some choices well ahead of when I needed to.

And maybe the lesson learned here was like, how do I trust my team on what they're telling me, but also make decisions in smaller increments?

How do you buy yourself a little more time, especially as an operator?

I made a preemptive decision that I could have waited on.

So how do you wait till the last responsible moment to make that decision?

I didn't blame it on anybody else.

I didn't blame it on something else.

I just said, hey, I screwed that up.

I think here's.

Here's what I've learned.

Here's how I would change it in the future.

And like, you know, I was like, hey, I'm going to keep moving forward.

I took a big bet because I thought with the decision in front of me, that was the right call.

And that was not the first wrong decision I made.

You know, that's the best part about being a big leader.

Early in my career, I made tons of prop makes mistakes I made, I did tons of.

I created so many problems.

And the reality is like navigating those and understanding how to identify them, fix them, and then not repeat them, I think is key.

And I think that's where I got the grace was I didn't repeat it.

I.

It it was.

I learned from that lesson for sure.

Amazon rewarded bold moves.

Our job is to find out, is it, is this one a, a zero one, is this a zero or a hundred?

That's probably not.

The vast majority are not.

How do we get as close to the right number as possible?

What kind of guidance do you give them when you're leading so many people so they can make decisions on their own and not sink the ship in making those?

I have a series of tenants that I'm always thinking about for, like, when we're building something from a technology perspective, a process perspective, one of those is we don't build interesting things, we build impactful things.

And one of those, it's like a backboard to throw up against.

And especially in the technology space with all the hype on AI and all the hype on all of these things, like doing things just to do things is actually not valuable.

It can be.

Some of the things that are impactful are also interesting.

But we are not out here just to build interesting things.

We want to impact a consumer, we want to impact a process, we want to impact the bottom line, whatever that might be.

And that's how, like, that backboard allows us to be able to have a framework.

Like, what's an example of some brutal feedback you had to deliver at Amazon?

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Here's the problem.

When you're that big of a company, you get so many people into one room and one building and one company, you're going to have great leaders and you're going to have really bad leaders.

There's just like, there's no way to get around it.

There's too many people in one place.

And so, I mean, I can think of one where I was getting like, this is probably first few months of my time in Amazon, I'm getting screamed at, like on the floor in front of associates.

My boss is just yelling at me and I'm like, I don't understand what's happening right now.

I'm like 22 years old.

I'm leading a team of like 250 people, which should be illegal, by the way.

Like, that's a lot.

I had no idea what I was doing.

And.

And like, we had a bad shift.

Like, we ran a bad shift.

And like, literally my, my manager, like, threw a water bottle through the wall and I was like, what just happened?

Because you had a bad shift, you started throwing stuff or she.

Yeah, I was like, what a.

What an environment.

I think the.

The lesson that I learned over time was like, I got feedback that, like, I became a hammer.

It was just like, you.

If I see a nail, like, I'm going to smoke it.

Right?

And like, I became this, like, crazy good executor.

But I would kind of just like, hey, I'm gonna run through the wall and if you can keep up with me, fantastic.

But I'm not gonna bring you with me.

Like, I'm gonna surround myself with people that can only run as fast as me.

And if you can't, like, literally, you don't have a home here.

Something that will stick through me forever, and that is know your people and know your process in that order.

You became the culture that you were like, that's how you would succeed in that environment.

But then how, over time, even with my time in Amazon, as I started going, I was like, okay, I can actually be direct.

I can be impactful, but I don't have to be a jerk.

I can be like, you're not doing what you need to do.

And I can, I can be like, you are garbage.

There's a huge difference between the two things I had to kind of unlearn and rethink about interacting with people is what is like the rob way of being direct.

How do I make sure I'm not hurting people while I'm holding accountability?

I was working in warehouse environment, and then I started working with developers and product people.

You can imagine that, like, I initially was like, beating the hell out of.

Developer now develop the.

Develop the new program now.

And they don't, they don't go with that too well.

No.

So it's a totally different thing.

And so leading differently in those environments.

I really had to rethink the way.

And honestly, it's been such a nice journey for me because where I've landed is so much more genuinely me.

I've really.

I feel like it's been.

And I'm still learning, I'm still making mistakes.

I probably will forever.

That's.

That's part of the human condition, I think.

But it's been, it's been Quite the challenge for me to understand, like, how do I make sure that I'm not just a hammer chasing nails and make sure that I'm actually meeting my team where they are and me being effective for them is actually my job.

Again, I'm a professional leader.

My job is actually to lead the team.

It's not to do a task.

We don't have to operate in a black and white world.

We have to treat our people all like this or like that.

We need to understand the gray and the nuance and take advantage of that and really operate in that world.

I think that's what we are as leaders, right?

Like the black and white machine can do, like the gray is literally why we all have jobs, right?

Like it is.

And that's, that's the key.

It's.

I'm a human being.

I have, you know, agency.

I have decisions that I can end up making to affect something.

I think that's what make great leaders tick, right?

Like, it's like, that's what I want.

I want to give myself a position where I can have a positive impact on an outcome and a process on a group of people.

And so I think that gray is what we live for.

If the, the ones that love leadership, I think they live for that gray.

One of the things that comes to me too is the culture we create for our teams as a leader is beyond just the results.

You're really setting that person up.

Like, that's how they, that's that the leadership be experienced is how they're going to often treat their people 100%.

I mean, we're the people.

As a leader, I said this to my team.

Somebody said this to me early in my career, basically, like, remember that, like when, when that person goes home and sits at the dinner table tonight, they're going to talk about you.

When I'm leading, you know, thousands of people, like, I can't remember every single name.

I can't remember every single situation.

But what I can do is, like, be intentional about the interactions I have because I know that, like, think about the leaders and the situations.

You've been a celebrity, like, you have an interaction.

Like, I remember this situation a lot.

And like, as a leader, I'm not going to remember every interaction I have, but it can be super impactful for that person because they, like, have made, you know, I'm just a human being.

But, like, that is something where they end up.

It becomes a lot more impactful and that has a lasting impression.

So if I, like, have a tough interaction with that person because I'm having a tough day that could have an impact on how they do it for years.

You know what comes to me is you are the first domino of the day for a lot of people and if it's a positive one, it's going to trigger positive interactions throughout their day, all the way to the dinner table, even putting their kids to bed at night.

And it could be the reverse.

So it's a big responsibility.

Yeah.

Rob, been following today, sir.

I think we're going have to have you on again because y' all are just getting rolling at pattern.

I mean it's really.

And your leadership's going to keep evolving as this world we live in keeps changing.

So can't wait to see what you all do next.

Well, thank you very much.

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