Kim Scott "Radical Candor" INBOUND Bold Talks

Thank you so much. Thanks so much. I think that given last night's events, I'm going to change the title of this talk. To be a kick ass citizen without losing your humanity. The idea of radical candor is something that will help you do the very best work of your life. But more importantly, from my perspective, it'll also help you build the very best relationships of your career. It's a simple idea. And to explain what I mean by it, I'm just going to start with a quick story about a time when my boss, who was Sheryl Sandberg, criticized me. I had just started at Google and I had to give a presentation to Google's founders and CEO about how the business was doing. And like any normal person in this situation, I felt a little bit nervous. And so I walked in wondering how I'm going to get these people's attention. And. And all I had to do was say how many new customers we had added in the last couple of months. And Eric Schmidt, the CEO, almost fell out of his chair. So I felt like the meeting had gone pretty well. In fact, I felt like a genius. So as I'm leaving the meeting, I walk past my boss, kind of expecting a high five or some form of congratulations, and she says to me, why don't you walk back to my office with me? And I think, oh shit, I've done something wrong. I don't know what it is, but I'm about to hear about it. And she says to me, after a little bit of praise, she says, you said an awful lot. Were you aware of it? And I sort of breathed a huge sigh of relief and I kind of made a brush off gesture and I said, yes, I know I do that. It's kind of a verbal tic, no big deal really. And she said, well, I know a great speech coach, Google would pay for it. Would you like an introduction? And I sort of make that brush off gesture with my hand again. And I said, did you hear about all those customers? I'm busy, I don't have time for a speech coach. And she stops, she looks right at me and she says, when you make that gesture with your hand, I can see I'm going to have to be a lot more direct with you. When you say every third word, it makes you sound stupid. Stupid and insecure. Now she has my full attention. And some people would have said that it was mean of her to say that, but in fact, it was the very kindest thing she could have done for me at that moment in my career. Because when I did go to the speech coach. And now that I knew I sounded stupid and insecure, I did go see the speech coach. I realized she really wasn't exaggerating. I did say every third word. And the weird thing about this was that I had been giving presentations for my entire career. I had given hundreds of presentations over the course of 15 years and nobody had told me how often I said. It was as though I'd been walking around for my whole career with my fly down and nobody had had the courtesy to tell me, why don't you zip your fly up? And this really got me to thinking two things. One, what was it that made it so seemingly easy for Cheryl to tell me? And two, why had nobody else told me? And when I thought about it, it really boiled down to two things. I knew that Cheryl cared about me personally as she did about everyone who worked for her. And I also knew that she was willing to challenge me directly. She wasn't so worried about hurting my feelings that she was unwilling to tell me something I needed to know. So that seems simple. Who doesn't do that? So I really got to analyzing this and I thought about it in terms of a two by two. So care personally challenge directly. Let's take each axis in turn. First, care personally. This is what I call the give a damn axis. Right now, nobody starts out their career thinking I don't give a damn about people, so I'm going to be a great colleague. Nobody starts out an election cycle thinking I don't give a damn about my fellow Americans and and therefore I'm going to be a great citizen. That's not how it works. What happens to us? What moves us down on the care personally access. Really early in our careers, we're often told to be professional, right? Be more than just professional. That's my advice. Because when you start out as only professional, you move way down on the care personally access. Because somehow the this advice to be professional so often gets translated to mean leave your emotions, leave your humanity, leave the very best part of yourself at home. You're never going to do the best work of your life if you leave half of yourself, especially the best half of yourself, at home. So bring your whole self to work. Bring your whole self to a political conversation the next time you have one. Care personally about the person you're talking to. You can't care about somebody else with only half of yourself. So that's the give a damn axis. Next, the challenge directly axis. This is what I call the willing to piss people off dimension. Right. Colin Powell said that leadership is often about being willing to piss people off. Let's not forget that it's actually important to be willing to piss people off. But our reluctance to do this begins not when we are 18 years old, but when we're 18 months old. When we first learned to speak. How many of you had a parent who said, if you don't have something nice to say, don't say it at all? Right now, it's your job to say it. Now you've got to tell people what you really think in order for either your thinking to be corrected or for theirs to be corrected. So radical candor happens when you fulfill your moral obligation. It's not just your job, it's your moral obligation to say what you really think and to allow yourself to challenge others, but also to be challenged in return. And when you can do both of those things at the same time, when you can challenge people directly at the same time that you care personally and humanly about them, I call that radical candor. That's why it's rare. I just gave you two reasons why it's rare. This professional thing and this if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it at all thing. What I've done to make it less rare, to make it easier for you to be radically candid, is to name the quadrants where you fail on one dimension or another with some emotionally charged language. So when you challenge directly but you don't care personally, I call that obnoxious aggression. This is also known as the asshole quadrant, right? Now, the reason why I don't just call it the asshole quadrant is because it's not useful to write names in these various quadrants, right? It's not. One of the biggest problems that I've seen over the course of this election is what's called the fundamental attribution error, or as I explained to my children, name calling. Don't use these terms to call other people names. You use them to guide you in your conversations with others, right? So don't be obnoxiously aggressive. Don't judge yourself, don't judge others as obnoxiously aggressive, but judge a conversation as obnoxiously aggressive and move it in the right direction. Now, when you fail on both dimensions, I call it manipulative insincerity, right? When you neither care nor challenge. And then there's the quadrant where most mistakes are actually get made, because people usually do care about each other. Despite all of the rhetoric of the last 48 hours, I really do believe most people are fundamentally decent and do care at a human level about each other. And when you care so much about somebody that you fail to challenge them, I call it ruinous empathy. Right. So those are the mistakes that you can make in either political discourse or giving feedback at work. Now, in order to motivate each of these quadrants, I'm just going to tell you a few quick stories. First, radical candor. A lot of people make a mistake with radical candor, thinking that they have to take a bunch of time to be radically candid. But the origin story for me with radical candor happened in less than a minute on the street of Manhattan. I had just gotten a new puppy and I love this dog, had never said harsh word to the dog and as a result, it was out of control and had no idea how to behave. And it jumped in front of a cab. I pulled it out of the way just in time and all of a sudden my heart is thumping in my throat and this man, perfect stranger standing next to me looks at me and he says, I can see you really love that dog. It's all he has to say to move up on the care, personally accessed dog. He doesn't have to know my name, doesn't have to have schmoozed with me, just I can see you really love that dog. And then he says to me, but you're going to kill that dog if you don't teach it to sit. Now he's got my full attention. Then he says, sit. The dog sat. I had no idea the dog knew how to do that. And I kind of looked at him in amazement. The light changes, he looks back at me and he says, it's not mean, it's clear. And he crosses the street and leaves me with words to live by. Right. Didn't have to take him forever, and he changed my life in just that brief amount of time. So radical candor can be quick, doesn't need to require a lot of schmoozing. Next, obnoxious aggression. I will tell you, I will assert for the record, I'm not an asshole, but I do occasionally behave like one. And I bet all of you have just occasionally done the same thing. So this also comes from a time shortly after I joined Google. Amazing I lasted there as long as I did. I had a disagreement with Larry Page about an adsense policy and I wrote an email to 30 people that said, larry claims he wants to organize all the world's information, but if it'll make us a buck, he's willing to create clutter sites that muddle the world's information. Right? Not my most politically astute move. Worth taking a second to understand why I did it. I did it because I believe there's a special place in hell for people who kiss up and kick down. But it doesn't mean doing the exact opposite makes a ton of sense either, right? Caring personally is something that you owe to every human being you interact with, either at work or in life. So that was my foray into obnoxious aggression. As with all things, the COVID up is worse than the crime. Larry didn't actually mind that. In fact, I learned later that he thought it was funny. But what happened next was where I got into real trouble. Which when instead of moving up on the care personally axis, I moved over in the wrong direction on the challenge directly axis. I bumped into Larry a couple of days later. A friend of mine was like, wow, that was pretty stupid, Kim. And so instead of looking into it and actually understanding the challenge that he had made and caring personally, I just went and said, I lied. I said, oh, Larry, I'm sorry about that email. I realize you're right, I'm wrong, and he's got a pretty good bullshit meter and he kind of looks at me like I'm a pigeon that pooped on his shoulder and walks off. A friend of mine patted me on the shoulder and said, he likes it better when you disagree with him, so don't move in the wrong direction when you realize you've been a jerk. Last but not least, ruinous empathy. The quadrant where most of us make most of our mistakes. To explain what I mean by ruinous empathy, I'm going to describe probably the most painful moment in my career. I had just hired this guy Bob. I really liked Bob a lot. He was funny, he was quirky. We were having one of those management off sites and playing a ridiculous management get to know you game that nobody dared say. This is a waste of time. Bob finally said, why don't we just go around the table and confess what candy our parents used when potty training us. Weird, but fast then weirder yet, we all remembered Hershey's Kisses. And for the next 10 months, every time there was a tense moment in a meeting, Bob would whip out just the right piece of candy for the right person at the right moment. So he endeared himself to all of us. There was just one problem with Bob. His work was terrible. Absolutely terrible. I learned later the problem was he was smoking pot in the bathroom, which maybe explained all that candy. But Anyway, I didn't know it at the time. I kept trying to buck Bob up with false praise and say, bob, you are so smart. This is not quite there yet, but I know you can do it. And he had no idea how bad things were until 10 months later, it became clear to me that if I did not fire Bob, I was going to lose half my team. And when I sat down and told Bob, explained Bob the situation, when I finished, he pushed his chair back from the table, he looked right at me, and he said, why didn't you tell me? And as that question is going around in my head, with no very good answer, he said, why didn't anyone tell me? I thought you all cared about me. And I realized I'm having to fire Bob now because of mistakes that I made. Six really important mistakes. I didn't ask him to tell me what was going well, and I never asked him for criticism. Maybe I was doing something that was driving him to toke up in the bathroom. I don't know. I didn't find out, and I should have. I never gave him praise that was meaningful. I basically just gave him praise that was a head fake. I never told him when his work wasn't good enough. And worst of all, I failed to create the kind of environment in which everyone would tell Bob what was truly good and when he was going off the rails. And all I could do in that moment was to make a very solemn promise to myself I would never make that mistake again. And I would help everyone whom I worked with never to make that mistake again. And that is why I spent the time to come up with this radical candor framework which I hope will help you all never to make that mistake. Thank you all very much. Great talking to you.